As you know, we’ve invested a lot recently in our retrieve API (see the jquery plugin and subscribe & retrieve. This API allows you to retrieve the past content from any feed, based on what Superfeedr stored of it. It’s an easy way to bootstrap your application with historic data before you start getting new entries.
Today we’re introducing a small addition to this API: the before and after params. They allow you to paginate over past entries by getting the ones that have been published before or after one that you’ve identified.
The value that you have to pass is the id of a entry which was previously published in the feed.
Try it out by typing the following into your shell:
$ curl -X GET https://push.superfeedr.com/
-udemo:demo
-d'hub.mode=retrieve'
-d'hub.topic=http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed'
-d'format=json'
-d'count=10'
-d'after=http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed/4045001'Staying in Sync
The most important benefit of this new feature is to make sure your client did not miss any data and yet be able to quickly retrieve whatever data could have been missed.
Let’s imagine your application goes down for a couple minutes or hours. When it comes back up, it will start getting notifications again. At this point, for each feed with a notification, you’re able to send a request to get the entries published before the one you just received. You could also keep track of the latest id you received for each feed and use the after param accordingly.
Let us know what you think!
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