IATI Developer Blog

A technical blog from your friendly neighborhood IATI Developers.

Why does IATI validation enforce element order?

If you’ve ever had to write software that imports or exports IATI data, you may have noticed that the order of the XML elements is considered a critical part of the schema validation. Why was this change made historically, and why does it persist today?

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Implementing a Scalable Download Feature

Today we released the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s Datastore Search. One of the main features of the product is to allow the user to download their search results in JSON, CSV, or original IATI XML format. This enables data users to export and use the IATI data in their own systems or analysis. Previous iterations of the IATI Datastore either required pagination over results to get a full view of the data or struggled to consistently handle requests for large amounts of data. This post covers how we tackled this issue on the IATI Unified Platform.

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Inefficiency by Cloud Design

When I started to play this game, back in the early years of this century, we had system administrators on staff.

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The IATI Unified Platform is Launched!

For the last decade or so, IATI software as cared for by the core IATI technical team has been a smorgasbord of tools contributed by all sorts, each operating independently on innumerable servers, each repeating a number of things in different and exotic ways - most presciently, downloading the 8000+ plus IATI documents to occupy many duplicated gigabytes of storage space.

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Welcome to the IATI Developer Blog!

Hello and welcome to the first post on our brand new IATI Developer Blog. We’re intending this blog to be a place for us to document the challenges we’ve faced as we build your favourite IATI tools, as well as the solutions we’ve designed to overcome them.

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