Update Notification Protocol

Status: Draft

Introduction

Since version 2.0.3 OpenOffice.org users of builds providing an UpdateURL can manually check for available updates by invoking "Help -> Check for Updates .." . Starting with version 2.0.4 OpenOffice.org can perform this check automatically in a user configurable interval.

This is an attempt to define a second version of the update notification protocol, which is better extendable, can also be used for extensions and no longer uses http post requests.

Request

The update notification request is a http get request to an URL, which may contain the operating system and processor type the OpenOffice.org instance is compiled for either as part of the URL or as URL parameter.

Examples

UpdateURL=http://update.services.openoffice.org/ProductUpdateService/check.Update2?_OS=Solaris&_ARCH=SPARC

UpdateURL=http://www.example.org/MyProduct/MyOS/MyArch

User Agent field

To reduce the amount of transfered data when asking for OpenOffice.org updates, the user agent field contains all information required to identify a specific build plus the UI language currently in use:

OpenOffice.org/2.2 (680m212 (Build:9263); Solaris; SPARC; BundledLanguages=en-US_fr) (lang=de)

Update documents and feeds

The simplest possible reply is of the following form:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<update xmlns="http://installation.openoffice.org/update">
  <id>OpenOffice.org_2_en-US_fr</id>
  <version>2.2.0-5</version>
  <os>Solaris</os>
  <arch>SPARC</arch>
</update>