Best Practices

How do Deal With Fluctuating API Changes?

ServicePower strongly recommends that clients follow the Tolerant Reader design pattern when integrating to the ServicePower REST APIs. By following the tolerant reader pattern your client integration will not break when a new field is added to a REST API. To summarize, the tolerant reader pattern is about only consuming (parsing) the data elements you require and ignoring everything else. By ignoring unused fields this has the advantage of also ignoring new fields that may be added in the future.

• Google "Tolerant Reader"
• http://servicedesignpatterns.com/WebServiceEvolution/TolerantReader
• http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TolerantReader.html