Decision: System last updated behavior - Enterprise-CMCS/cmcs-eregulations GitHub Wiki

Thing	Info
Relevant features	Content view, footer
Date started	2021-03-29
Date finished	2021-04-02
Decision status	Done
Summary of outcome	Record last successfully-updated date for each part. Using that information, design a display that makes sense for our users.

Background/context

Users want to be able to learn how recently the regulations in the system have been updated.

Does this apply to both regulations and supplemental content?
- If both, which supplemental content?
Which regulation defines the single date? Some regulations may not be updated at the same time as others, due to parser failures or lack of access to data.
- In this case, is there an updated date per part?
- In this case, do we prevent any from updating if one of them can't?

Types of content in our system:

Users want:

One date for all reg text.
Is this the latest reg text (incorporating the stuff that is effective), as of yesterday or today?
When was the reg text last refreshed from a source that I trust?
It is much less important to display last updated info for subreg guidance - people want to understand how that updating process happens, but the specific updated date is less important, especially since most of the specific content will have dates associated with it - we can consider this out of scope for this decision.

Technical info:

Currently eRegs makes an effort to parse new content from the Federal Register every day. This is not super reliable - sometimes needs fixing to make it work.
If we switch eRegs to use eCFR instead, we should be able to reliably pull in new content every day.

Things we can do:

We decided at Decision: Reg content sources to use eCFR, which simplified this decision. We'll do the thing we can do.