Updates to resource URL structure.

We are long overdue for an update. The full version will come shortly; we have been working overtime to release some significant updates and onboard exciting new clients. However, there is something that a few of our clients have noticed, and I want to talk about it now.

Our search engine is deep linked, meaning that you can copy/paste views (search lists and resource details) someone else, and they will see exactly what you see. It’s a popular feature.

Originally, for resource details, we used the ID of your original resource record to identify the “page” for that resource in a URL. As we start adding more data sets into our core database there is an absolute certainty) that some IDs will conflict. To fix that, we started coercing everyones IDs into something mostly unique using hashing (taking a bunch of data values and putting them together as a new string of “random” looking text that is always the same size). So everyone’s resource details URL changed. This is a good step, but…

Historical links to resources broke. While necessary, we never want that to happen again, so we added code that automatically forwards traffic to old URLs to the new URL in future.

Which brings us to the really exciting part of this development. We will for sure be updating all URLs at least one more time, when we start using UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) that make your resource URLs unique, not only in our system, but in all systems. This is a step on the road towards enabling our platform to be used as a federated resource exchange, but more on that at a later time.

For now, if you saw your resource IDs change recently, that’s what is going on.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you for more updates shortly. Cheers!