Decision: System last updated behavior

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

This is related to Decision: Reg content sources.

Core questions

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?

What we know

Types of content in our system:

• Updates to reg text
• Supplemental content (especially sub-regulatory guidance)

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 - 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:

• Record last successfully-updated date for each part.
• Using that information, design a display that makes sense for our users.

Things we need to decide + options for them

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

Consequences