Clarification on last_modified behavior

Dan Bonville · January 2021

Apologies if I am missing this somewhere, but I was hoping someone from BB could clarify the behavior of the last_modified parameter, specifically on the Constituent List endpoint.

Does this last_modified value account only for changes in data that we see returned from the Constituent List endpoint or does any update to any information associated to a Constituent cause this to update? For example, if I were to add/edit an Education or Relationship associated to a constituent, would we expect the last modified date to update on the record returned from that constituent for the constituent endpoint?

I will do some testing with our sandbox site, I was just wondering if there was perhaps some documentation on this somewhere to better inform our design.

Thanks for the help,

Dan

Dan Bonville · January 2021

Just some notes from my testing:

Adding an email address (one that is not present in the data returned by the Constituent endpoint) DOES update the date_modified on the constituent
Adding an Education record DOES update the date_modified on the constituent
Adding a Relationship DOES NOT update the date_modified on the constituent

Starting to seem like the answer to my question is "sometimes".

Anthony Gallo · January 2021

Without digging in too deep there is definitely a difference between how relationships are added and data on a record. Those first 2 fields are data tied directly to a record that is updated and saved. When a relationship is added, it isn't a field exactly and we are just pointing to IDs on the back end. I can see relationships being excluded from it being considered an update to the record itself.