API Changelog

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I will post any updates regarding changes to the Very Beta API here. I will try to announce any potential breaking changes, additions, etc. So subscribe to this discussion thread for notifications (I'll lock this thread, so it should only contain announcements).

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Earlier today, I changed the Colorado Kroger feed to mach the other formats, so now most of the providers should share the same structure.

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A couple changes:

• New State-Wide APIs (please switch): The APIs published at https://www.vaccinespotter.org/api/ are now state-wide GeoJSON files (as well as a US-wide states.json file). For example, https://www.vaccinespotter.org/api/v0/states/AL.json. Even if you don't care about the GeoJSON formatting (the structure is just a bit more nested), hopefully this new format is better cleaned up and easier to use. I've tried to better clean up a lot of the metadata the web interface was previously handling so it's better standardized in the API (so there's a simpler list of all the active pharmacy providers in the metadata, brands have been better split out to support things like Kroger and it's sub-brands, and more).

  While I'm still publishing updates to the old /api/v0/stores/{state}/{provider}.json files in the old format, I may not forever, so I'd encourage anyone using the APIs to switch to the new state-wide GeoJSON files. If you have any issues or comments about the new format, let me know.

• Walmart: The Walmart's appointments array now contains an array of objects (eg, { "type": "string", "time": "iso8601 string" }), instead of an array of iso8601 strings. This additional type information may include the vaccine type (Pfizer or Moderna), due to changes made in Walmart scanning needs additional inventory check #50

  The appointments array can either be an array of strings or an array of objects depending on the provider. I'm slowly transitioning everything so the schema will be an array of objects, but if you're working with these results, I'd encourage you to handle both formats for now.

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Earlier today, I added data for Weis, Winn-Dixie, Harveys, and Fresco y Más chains of stores. One potentially incompatible change is that for these providers appointments we only have date information, not specific times. This means the format of the appointments object is a bit different for these providers. For these, this data looks like { "type": "string", "date": "iso8601 date string" }. I know there's already variation in this appointments structure across other providers, so sorry for adding yet another variation on this!

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I added Wegmans data yesterday, but just a heads up if you are using this Wegmans data via the API: The API previously returned the URLs for the direct booking site (https://c.ateb.com/...). However, I've heard from Wegmans that this was causing issues (people were scheduling appointments they were not eligible for), so please only link to the URL currently being returned in the API: https://www.wegmans.com/covid-vaccine-registration/ This is their screening tool that should help not create extra work for their staff (which I feel terrible about!). If you're simply using the url field in the API, then this should now be correct, but if you have old data or had manually saved the old URL in some fashion, I just wanted to let other developers know to please only use the wegmans.com URL to help them out. Thank you!

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CVS data has changed. If you were reliant on the id fields for CVS locations, the API will now have new IDs for CVS locations. This is due to the CVS data now being based on the physical store locations, rather than the fuzzier city-wide results. But this should make the data more accurate. See #172 for additional context.

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👋 I'm planning to stop updating the Vaccine Spotter data and APIs on September 23, 2021.

This isn't as much time as I'd normally like to give for a deprecation notice like this, but I recently discovered that the data hadn't been updating from August 14-September 12 without many people noticing, so I sort of figure this might be overdue.

For more details about the shutdown, some usage statistics that may be interesting, and thank yous see https://www.vaccinespotter.org/shutdown/

But if this is problematic for any API users still out there, please contact me to let me know. I could potentially be convinced to keep things going for a bit longer, but since I haven't been actively maintaining it and the current issues are different than appointment availability, I'm not sure how useful it is at this point.

Thanks to everyone for their support!

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Based on some feedback from API users, I'm still taking the website down today, but I'm going to try and keep the data and APIs updating until October 26, 2021. I'm still not really actively maintaining this, so the APIs may break again, but hopefully that extra time will make it a bit easier for API users to migrate to other solutions. Thanks again for the feedback and support!

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The site and APIs are now shutdown. Hope this doesn't cause too many disruptions for anyone, but thanks for your understanding! I've made backups of the final data and historical data, so give a shout if anyone needs access to any of the final data.