Extensible message schema

I had an insight about messages earlier this week, one which perhaps ought to have been obvious.  But since I have been missing it, I figured that I should share.

When people talk about adding optional elements to a message, default values for those optional elements are not defined by the consumer -- they are defined by the message schema.

In other words, each consumer doesn't get to choose their own preferred default value.  The consumer inherits the default value defined by the schema they are choosing to implement.

For instance, if we are adding a new optional "die roll" element to our message, then consumers need to be able to make some assumption about the value of that field when it is missing.

But simply rolling a die for themselves is the "wrong" answer, in the sense that it isn't repeatable, and different consumers will end up interpreting the evidence in the message different ways.  In other words, the message isn't immutable under these rules.

Instead, we define the default value in the schema - documenting that the field is xkcd 221 compliant; just as every consumer that understands the schema agrees on the semantics of the new value, they also agree on the semantic meaning of the new value's absence.


If two consumers "need" to have different default values, that's a big hint that you may have two subtly different message elements to tease apart.

These same messaging rules hold when your "message" is really a collection of parameters in a function call.  Adding a new argument is fine, but if you aren't changing all of the clients at the same time then you really should continue to support calls using the old parameter list.

In an ideal world, the default value of the new parameter won't surprise the old clients, by radically changing the outcome of the call.

To choose an example, suppose we've decided that some strategy used by an object should be configurable by the client.  So we are going to add to the interface a parameter that allows the client to specify the implementation of the strategy they want.

The default value, in this case, really should be the original behavior, or it semantic equivalent.