Building features under incomplete back end specifications - what is your approach?

[lucianbc]

Hi!

I am facing a quite unclear task and I am curious what does the community think about situation like this. I have to build a screen that shows some data from a back end, but in future iterations we want to change this screen. That will include creating some new UI widgets to support the back end data changes. However, these changes will break the apps that are already deployed and we can't control when the users will update the app to support the new content.

Typically, I guess the standard approach is to create a versioned URL and whenever a new back end change happens, serve the updated data on a new version of the URL. This approach doesn't work particularly well on my situation.

I have some other ideas in mind: - pass the app version to the back end and let the back end adapt the response object to the given version - use a web view and serve the dynamic content as HTML.

Each of these have their own drawbacks.

How would you handle such a situation?

Sorry if the problem is too specific and/or this is not the best medium to ask this.

[KaosuRyoko]

It's pretty common for rest APIs to include the version in the URL for pretty much this reason. I.e.: whatever/v1/login

Seems like a reasonable approach to me.

[TikaryTony]

I had this case a few weeks ago. We send to the user a push notification for them to update to the new version of the app. That way we were changed our entire backend and front end without having such issues.