Home/ Questions/Q 514413
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T07:31:19+00:00

Background: I will be working on tools that will be dependent on a rapidly

  • 0

Background:
I will be working on tools that will be dependent on a rapidly changing API and rapidly changing data model over which I will have zero control.

Data model and API changes are common, the issue here is that my code must continue to work with current and all past versions (ie 100% backwords compatibility) because all will continue to be used internally.

It must also gracefully degrade when it runs into missing/unknown features etc.

The tools will be written in C# with WinForms and are for testing custom hardware.

<Edit>

My goal would be something close to only having to create classes to add features and when data model changes come, create a new set of data model classes that will get created by a factory based on API version.

The challenge for me is that future features then may depend on the specific data models, which may be mixed and matched (until a final combo is reached). How would you handle this gracefully?

<Edit2>

Of course, once a product is shipped, I would like to reuse the tool and just add code for newer products. Before I started here, every product cycle meant rewriting (from scratch) all the tooling, something I aim to prevent in the future 🙂

</Edit>

Question:
What design techniques and patterns would you suggest or have had success with to maintain compatibility with multiple versions of an API/Data Model?

What pitfalls should I watch out for?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Practically all the SOLID patterns apply here, but particularly the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and Open/Closed Principle (OCP).

    The OCP specifically states that the type should be open for extension, but closed for modification – that sounds like a good fit in your case, because this would be a way to ensure backwards compatibility.

    The SRP is also very helpful here because it means that if a class does only one thing, and that thing becomes obsolete, it doesn’t drag along a lot of other problems. It can just be left to die on its own.

    On a more practical level, I would suggest that you follow two principles:

    TDD (or just a comprehensive unit test suite) will help protect you against breaking changes.

    • 0