RepositoryFeed

The Person Finder application publishes a list of its available repositories in an Atom feed. You can use this feed to automatically detect when a repository is launched or shut down.

Feed URL

The global repository feed is available at:

https://www.google.org/personfinder/global/feeds/repo

There are also individual feeds for each repository, available at:

https://www.google.org/personfinder/repository/feeds/repo

All these feeds are in Atom format. The global feed has one Atom entry for each active repository; the feed for a specific repository has just the one entry for that repository.

The Atom entries contain custom elements, described below, that use the XML namespace URI http://schemas.google.com/personfinder/2012 (referenced using the short prefix gpf).

When a new repository is launched, a new entry appears in this feed. When a repository is shut down, its entry disappears from this feed.

Entry details

Each Atom entry contains the following standard Atom elements:

• The <id> element contains the URL to the repository's starting page, which is usable as a unique identifier for the repository.
  
• The <title> element contains the displayed title of the repository in its default language. The element also has an xml:lang attribute identifying the repository's default language.
  
• The <published> element contains the date and time that the repository was first publicly listed as an active repository.
  
• The <updated> element contains the date and time that the repository's activation state or test mode state last changed. It is initially the same as <published>, but, for example, if a repository first started in test mode, then switched to real mode, this element would contain the date and time of the switch.

The <content> of the Atom entry contains a single <gpf:repo> element with the following child elements:

• There are one or more <gpf:title> elements containing the displayed title of the repository in each available language. Each <gpf:title> element has an xml:lang attribute identifying the language.
  
• The <gpf:read_auth_key_required> element contains the string true if an API key is required to read records through the API.
  
• The <gpf:search_auth_key_required> element contains the string true if an API key is required to make search queries through the API.
  
• The <gpf:location> element contains a GeoRSS point specifying the approximate location of the incident. (A GeoRSS point is a <georss:point> containing the latitude, then a space, then the longitude.)
  
• The <gpf:test_mode> element contains the string true if the repository is in test mode. In test mode, records that are more than 6 hours old are automatically deleted.