SOA Patterns | Design Patterns | Version Identification

SOA Patterns > Service Governance Patterns > Version Identification

Home > Design Patterns > Version Identification

Version Identification (Orchard, Riley)

How can consumers be made aware of service contract version information?

Problem

When an already-published service contract is changed, unaware consumers will miss the opportunity to leverage the change or may be negatively impacted by the change.

Solution

Versioning information pertaining to compatible and incompatible changes can be expressed as part of the service contract, both for communication and enforcement purposes.

Application

With Web service contracts, version numbers can be incorporated into namespace values and as annotations.

Impacts

This pattern may require that version information be expressed with a proprietary vocabulary that needs to be understood by consumer designers in advance.

Principles

Standardized Service Contract

Architecture

Service

Because the service contracts express versioning information, Consumer A can proceed to invoke version 3 of the service contract because it was designed to be compatible with that specific version.

This page contains excerpts from:

SOA Design Patterns by Thomas Erl

(ISBN: 0136135161, Hardcover, Full-Color, 400+ Illustrations, 865 pages)

For more information about this book, visit www.arcitura.com/books.

This page contains excerpts from:

Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA

by Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, Umit Yalcinalp, Canyang Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, James Pasley