Efficient polling

The REST API allows you to poll for the status of certain operations by performing a GET on various elements. Rather than re-downloading and re-parsing the full status at each polling interval, your REST client may use the changes-since and/or changes-before parameters to check for changes within a specified time.

The changes-since time or changes-before time is specified as an ISO 8601 dateTime (2011-01-24T17:08Z). The form for the timestamp is CCYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss. An optional time zone may be written in by appending the form ±hh:mm which describes the timezone as an offset from UTC. When the timezone is not specified (2011-01-24T17:08), the UTC timezone is assumed.

The following situations need to be considered:

• If nothing has changed since the changes-since time, an empty list is returned. If data has changed, only the items changed since the specified time are returned in the response. For example, performing a GET against:

  https://api.servers.openstack.org/v2.1/servers?changes-since=2015-01-24T17:08Z
  

  would list all servers that have changed since Mon, 24 Jan 2015 17:08:00 UTC.

• If nothing has changed earlier than or equal to the changes-before time, an empty list is returned. If data has changed, only the items changed earlier than or equal to the specified time are returned in the response. For example, performing a GET against:

  https://api.servers.openstack.org/v2.1/servers?changes-before=2015-01-24T17:08Z
  

  would list all servers that have changed earlier than or equal to Mon, 24 Jan 2015 17:08:00 UTC.

• If nothing has changed later than or equal to changes-since, or earlier than or equal to changes-before, an empty list is returned. If data has changed, only the items changed between changes-since time and changes-before time are returned in the response. For example, performing a GET against:

  https://api.servers.openstack.org/v2.1/servers?changes-since=2015-01-24T17:08Z&changes-before=2015-01-25T17:08Z
  

  would list all servers that have changed later than or equal to Mon, 24 Jan 2015 17:08:00 UTC, and earlier than or equal to Mon, 25 Jan 2015 17:08:00 UTC.

Microversion change history for servers, instance actions and migrations regarding changes-since and changes-before:

• The 2.21 microversion allows reading instance actions for a deleted server resource.

• The 2.58 microversion allows filtering on changes-since when listing instance actions for a server.

• The 2.59 microversion allows filtering on changes-since when listing migration records.

• The 2.66 microversion adds the changes-before filter when listing servers, instance actions and migrations.

The changes-since filter nor the changes-before filter change any read-deleted behavior in the os-instance-actions or os-migrations APIs. The os-instance-actions API with the 2.21 microversion allows retrieving instance actions for a deleted server resource. The os-migrations API takes an optional instance_uuid filter parameter but does not support returning deleted migration records.

To allow clients to keep track of changes, the changes-since filter and changes-before filter displays items that have been recently deleted. Servers contain a DELETED status that indicates that the resource has been removed. Implementations are not required to keep track of deleted resources indefinitely, so sending a changes-since time or a changes-before time in the distant past may miss deletions.