Freshness and certainty
Section states, stale data, when the API says "not found", and section versions.
A mirror can be behind. Accquix Register never turns “I do not know” into “it does not exist”.
Section states
Every lookup section carries a state:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| present | The source has a row for this subject. |
| absent | The source is fresh and has no row. This is a fact as of the source’s date. |
| unknown | The source was never published, or it is stale. The register does not know. |
Values derived from a section follow the same rule. For example vat.payer is true or false only from a fresh
list, and null otherwise.
Fresh and stale
Each source carries the date the agency stamped on its data (asOf). A source is stale when that date is older
than:
| Source | Maximum age |
|---|---|
| RPO | 3 days |
| Financial Administration lists | 2 days |
Reliability index (ds_iz_ran) |
14 days (it is refreshed irregularly) |
A stale section is still returned, with source.stale: true. GET /v1/sources shows every source’s state and date.
“Not found” only when it is true
| Situation | Answer |
|---|---|
| Every consulted source is fresh and none has the identifier | 404 not_found |
| Not found, but a consulted source is stale | 503 unavailable, reason source_stale |
| The mirror is still being built | 503 unavailable, reason bootstrapping |
| Found, some sections stale | 200, those sections flagged stale |
Treat 503 and unknown as “unknown”, never as “not found”. An outage of the register must not block your
workflow.
Versions
Every section has source.version: a hash of its content. A rebuild from the sources yields the same versions, so a
consumer can store the version with its copy and compare it later to see what changed. See
Change detection.
No history
The register keeps the current state, when a row last changed (changedAt), and when it disappeared from a list
(absent_since). A disappearance is an observation, never a legal date: for example, the Financial Administration
publishes no VAT cancellation date, and a payer that loses its registration simply leaves the list.