Best Practices for Versioning and Backward Compatibility

As POCO DataSet is used across services, UI clients, and plugins, versioning becomes an important concern. Changes to schemas, metadata, or behavior must be managed carefully to avoid breaking existing consumers.

General Guidelines

• Prefer additive changes (adding new columns or tables) instead of breaking changes.
• Avoid renaming or removing columns that are already in use by clients.
• Use default values when introducing new non-nullable columns.
• Document changes to DataSet contracts as part of your release process.

Schema Evolution Techniques

• Introduce new tables instead of overloading existing ones for different purposes.
• Use metadata flags or version fields to indicate behavior changes.
• Support multiple shapes of metadata in the short term during migrations.
• Keep converters tolerant of extra JSON fields (for forward compatibility).

Backward Compatibility in Distributed Systems

• Treat JSON payloads as contracts between services and clients.
• Coordinate changes across teams when DataSet schemas evolve.
• Log or monitor deserialization issues to detect compatibility problems early.

By following these practices, you can safely evolve your POCO DataSet structures while keeping existing integrations functional.

Table of Content POCO DataSet Serialization and Deserialization