Kick off a FHIR Bulk Data system-level $export with type filtering and poll for completion
domain: hl7.org/fhir · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Send a GET request to [fhir-base]/$export with headers Accept: application/fhir+json and Prefer: respond-async, optionally adding _type=Patient,Condition,Observation and _typeFilter parameters to scope the export
Receive the 202 Accepted response and extract the polling URL from the Content-Location response header
Poll the Content-Location URL with GET requests at intervals specified by the Retry-After header, checking for 202 (still in progress) versus 200 (complete)
On receipt of 200, parse the JSON manifest body which contains output[] array entries each with a type and url field pointing to NDJSON files, plus optional error[] and deleted[] arrays
Download each NDJSON file using an authorized GET request and process line-by-line, where each line is a complete FHIR resource JSON object
Known gotchas
The Content-Location polling URL must be used exactly as returned — do not modify or reconstruct it; some servers embed job tokens or signed URLs that break if altered
Bulk export NDJSON files can be extremely large; process them as streams rather than loading entire files into memory, and handle potential 404 errors on individual file downloads if the server expires output files after a time window
The X-Progress header on 202 polling responses is optional and implementation-defined — do not rely on it for progress measurement, and always base completion detection solely on the HTTP status code transitioning from 202 to 200
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