Change Logs

Most of the resources returned by the web service in response to HTTP GET requests correspond to standard Content Store structures that are well-known and described elsewhere: sections, content items, section pages, lists and inboxes. Change logs, however, are new structures that requires some explanation.

A change log is a record of all the changes made to a set of content items. The entries in a change log are ordered by change date and are in reverse chronological order (that is, the most recent change is listed first). All change logs are maintained in real time: every time a content item is created, deleted or modified, the change is inserted at the front of all appropriate change logs.

Change logs are maintained for all the content items managed by the Content Store. Special change logs are also maintained for all of a Content Store's person records (that is, content items containing information about all registered users of the Content Store - editors, authors, publication administrators and registered site users).

The Content Store maintains a number of different change logs, in order to ensure that users can only access change log entries for content items to which they have read access. Specifically, the Content Store maintains one content item change log for each of its protection domains. A protection domain is a set of sections governed by an explicitly defined set of access permissions. What this means in practice is that there is always at least one protection domain for each of a Content Store's publications, since there will always be an explicit set of access permissions associated with each publication's root section. A publication will have additional protection domains for any subsection that does not simply inherit access controls from its parent section, but has explicitly defined access controls of its own.

In addition to a change log for each protection domain, the Content Store maintains:

  • A person record change log for each publication

  • An aggregated change log for all changes made to content items belonging to the publication. (A content item belongs to the publication that contains its home section.)

Access to the change logs is governed as follows:

  • Access to the person record change log is granted to any user with journalist access to any part of any publication.

  • Access to a protection domain change log is granted to any user with read access to the relevant protection domain.

  • Access to an aggregated publication change log is granted to any user with global read access to the relevant publication.

A change log is returned as an Atom paged collection. The first entry in the first Atom feed returned represents the most recently changed content item in the protection domain represented by the change log. The next entry represents the second most recent change, and so on. You can get the next page, a feed containing an older set of changes by following this feed's next link.

Change logs can be accessed in two ways:

  • Via a link in the web service's "start" feed resource

  • Via a link in a section's "content items" feed resource

For advice on how to use the Content Store's change logs in the most efficient way, and how to make use of server-sent events (SSE), see Using Change Logs Effectively.