2020 - Q2 Newsletter
This edition will cover the following topics:
Upcoming 2020 - Q2 Changes for May
Old email accounts cleanup
FamilySearch has been connecting with developers for over ten years. In that time, there have been many that have shown interest at one time but have either changed email accounts or are no longer showing interest. In the next few months we are moving to an "opt in" approach in order to clean up the thousands of email contacts to where only those who are interested in continuing to remain on our developer newsletter mailing list. If there are multiple individuals in your organization that would like to be on this mailing list, or you have not been receiving emails in the past year, please contact devsupport@familysearch.org to be added to this new contact list.
Color Changes for Ordinance Status
- Pending Modification: n/a
- Release Date: End of May 2020
- Documentation Regarding Change: Compatibility Implementation Guide for Ordinances
While not a breaking change, the colors associated with the various ordinance status values will be changing soon in the FamilySearch Family Tree. The new values are documented in the guide (above). If your application has been written to be consistent with the Family Tree colors, you will want to be aware of this upcoming change.
- Gray: Completed or Not Needed
- Green: Request (User may reserve an ordinance)
- Blue: In Progress (Ordinance is currently being worked on such as Printed, Not Printed, Shared, or Waiting)
- Orange: Cannot Request (Ordinance is not complete and not ready such as Not Available, Needs More Information, or Not Ready)
Upcoming 2020 - Q3 Changes for August
Ordinance Reservation Shared Ready
- Pending Modification:
ordinance.status.shared.ready - Release Date: August 11, 2020
- Documentation Regarding Change:
- Video Explaining New Features password:"fsapi938844"
- Shared Reservation Migration Guide
- Updated Ordinance Reservation Guide
As announced in the 2020 Q1 Newsletter, the Ordinance Reservations are changing to allow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reserve an ordinance that has been shared with the temple. These ordinances will have new status codes as described in the documentation guides (above). These guides describe the endpoints, affected resources, http responses, and gedcomX changes necessary to view the ordinance status of a person and how to place a reservation.
Ordinance Reservation Limit
- Pending Modification:
ordinance.enforce.reservation.limit - Pending Modification:
ordinance.act.as.if.over.reservation.limit - Release Date: to be determined
- Documentation Regarding Change: (see description)
A new ordinance reservation policy will be released which limits the number of reserved ordinances to a maximum number per user. This new policy will not remove existing reservations beyond this maximum number, but will return an error when a user tries to reserve new ordinances that would exceed this limit.
A pending modification named ordinance.enforce.reservation.limit will enforce this policy and throw an error when a user attempts to make a reservation when the maximum amount of reservations has already been reached. This simulates the policy behavior when it is released.
A pending modification named ordinance.act.as.if.over.reservation.limit will enforce the new maximum reservation policy, no matter how many reservations have been reserved. This allows developers to test this functionality without needing to create a large number of test reservation data.
⚠️ Note: the production release of this limit will coincide with the availability of temple proxy work. It may happen as early as August, but may be delayed until later when all temples are open for regular activities. It is suggested to be ready for this change at the regularly quarterly August release.
General FamilySearch Updates
- Pending Modification: n/a
- Release Dates: varies
- Documentation Regarding Changes: FamilySearch Blog Post
This blog post (above) is regularly updated to show a summary of the major FamilySearch updates from a user / patron perspective. Many of these enhancements will not impact the FamilySearch API, but you may find it helpful to be aware of the various changes that have been released in the past few months.
2020 - Q1 Changes in Review
FamilySearch released the ARK URL changes previously mentioned in April, 2020. For a review of important best practices, see the January 2020 Newsletter.