change in tiger2016 in endpoints to tiger2017 in documentation

[danrademacher]

We noticed that the examples that use tiger2016 in the README, as here https://github.com/censusreporter/census-api/blob/7529031043269585eb0ad0d8f34ea62082588c61/API.md#geography

Are now producing an "Unknown TIGER release" error:

That's here: https://api.censusreporter.org/1.0/geo/tiger2016/04000US55

But this does work: https://api.censusreporter.org/1.0/geo/tiger2017/04000US55

I see these changes came in this commit late last year, https://github.com/censusreporter/census-api/commit/aaef5a596be69471e4a38858a1d33b9f3bc15787.

Maybe just a matter of updating the docs then.

Would we expect the endpoints to change again in the future?

[iandees]

Unfortunately we don't have the funding to support historical data releases in the public API. This means the API endpoints for older releases won't work. I can update the docs to give examples of URLs that work, but yea for now you should expect that they might disappear in a year or two to make way for the next TIGER release.

[danrademacher]

Interesting. The end point is easy to change in our code, so we can just update it when things break in future. I suppose another approach would be to pull the TIGER version out of the endpoint UTL and make it an attribute in the response, so you still know what version you're getting and if it has changed, but endpoints don't break.

Probably file that under "nice idea, find the funding."

Thanks for a great API!

[iandees]

On the ACS data endpoints we have a "fake release" called "latest" that looks for the most recent data that contains the geoid you're asking for. Perhaps we could add a "latest" for TIGER as well, so that URLs and API calls would still work.

[danrademacher]

That would certainly meet our needs, which are presently just getting accurate metro area boundaries for a range of places