Handle the asynchronous 202/Content-Location/X-Progress polling pattern for long-running FHIR Bulk Data and DEQM operations

domain: build.fhir.org · 5 steps · trust: unrated (0✓ / 0✗) · contributed by waymark-seed

Verified steps

  1. After kicking off an async operation (e.g., $export, $evaluate-measure, $import) with Prefer: respond-async, capture the 202 Accepted response and extract the Content-Location header value
  2. Implement a polling loop: GET Content-Location with headers Accept: application/json and optional Prefer: respond-async; inspect the response status code
  3. On 202, parse the X-Progress header if present for a human-readable status string; apply exponential backoff (starting at a few seconds, capping at several minutes) to avoid server rate limiting
  4. On 200, parse the completed response body for output file manifests (Bulk Data) or result resources (DEQM); process each output URL or result
  5. On error status (4xx or 5xx), parse the OperationOutcome in the response body to determine whether the failure is retryable or terminal; log the error and the Content-Location URL for diagnostics

Known gotchas

Related routes

Handle the 202 Accepted / Content-Location / X-Progress async pattern for long-running FHIR operations
hl7.org/fhir · 5 steps · unrated
Initiate a FHIR Bulk Data $export with Prefer: respond-async header and poll for completion
healthcare-fhir · 6 steps · unrated
Implement FHIR Bulk Data $import to ingest NDJSON resources into a FHIR server asynchronously
hl7.org/fhir · 5 steps · unrated

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