Developer Blog - API Updates in Preservica 7.5

For a summary of all our APIs, you can use the documentation index page.

Preservica 7.5 is a Cloud-only release and is not a Long Term Support (LTS) release. These API changes will be made available to non-cloud environments with our next LTS release, currently planned to be around the start of 2025.

Cancelling of Asynchronous Tasks

Some of our APIs expose progress information, through GET /progress/{token}. Where appropriate, these background tasks can now be cancelled by PUTting to /progress/{token}/status with a status of Cancelled.

At the moment, only asynchronous data set creation (for a migration policy impact report) via the Analytics API supports cancellation in this manner.

Content API

This API provides a read only view of your archive, search capabilities, asset download and information about entities suitable for a public access portal

Changes since 7.4

• When downloading an asset via GET /download, if the selected representation is multi-part, you will now receive a zipped PAX containing the display representation. For example if it's an email with attachments you will receive a PAX with the email itself and the attachments included.
• All search type endpoints allow you to specify a 'negative filter', i.e. search for items that don't match a field value. Use the operator field inside the field specification, e.g.:

  "fields": [
   {"name":"xip.security_descriptor","values":["secret"],"operator":"NOT"}
  ]

Entity API

The Entity API is the main way we expose information about entities stored in your Preservica system.

Changes since 7.4

• Endpoints that accept content for ingest (POSTs to /ingests on /root and /structural-objects/{so-ref}) will now identify PST files (by extension) as a package, not a single asset, in the same way that ZIP files are treated.

Metadata API

This API allows you to manage the new (forms/groups) view of descriptive metadata.

This API is marked Provisional as we're still working on it and there may be breaking changes.

Changes since 7.4

• Group fields can now have a displayName as well as a name. The name field is also used to construct internal properties that require it to be simple ASCII; adding a display name allows other characters to be used, so you can label fields in another language. This affects both the body you sent to PUT/POST to /groups, and the response when GETting a group.

Webhooks

There is a new webhook (INGEST_FAILED) which will receive notifications when an entity fails to ingest. Like other webhooks, you will only receive entity type and ref. You probably want to subscribe to this hook with includeIdentifiers turned on, as the identifiers you provided will be the only way to link the failed ingest to the consuming system's records.