This is an announcement for a breaking change to the default value of a parameter of the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API, to go live on . It potentially affects clients that use the wbcheckconstraints API action. (We are not aware of any such clients apart from the checkConstraints gadget, which is not affected.)
Recently, we added a status parameter to the wbcheckconstraints
API action, with the intention that API users can declare ahead of time
which results they’re actually interested in, so that other results
don’t need to be sent to them: specifically, for most items the vast
majority of results indicate compliance with a constraint, which we
expect most users aren’t interested in.
On , we will change the default value of the status parameter to violation|warning|bad-parameters.
We assume that most users of the API will only be interested in results
that actually indicate problems, and this should significantly reduce
the size of API responses. Users who wish to receive all results,
regardless of status, should specify status=* in their API requests.
Our motivation for this change is that we want to enable caching of
constraint check results, but don’t want to bloat the cache with tons of
compliance and not-in-scope results that we don’t even show in the
gadget. With the status parameter, we can store only
problematic results in the cache, while still guaranteeing that the
response we send is complete, since the request indicated that it only
needs these results anyways. This also means that when we enable caching
(see phabricator:T184812), only requests with status=violation|warning|bad-parameters will benefit from it.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
-- Lucas
Relevant tickets:
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