Open APIs

We were one of the early adopters of TMF620 v4 for our catalog management product. And we have been certifying our APIs using the V4 CTK from the time V4 was made available. Now we are trying to upgrade our 620 API to v5. 

We found that, there are a some changes which are not backward compatible. For example,

• the introduction of policy reference in productOfferingPrice replacing constraint reference
• In ProductSpecification resource, attributes productSpecCharacteristicValue and productSpecCharRelationship are renamed to characteristicValueSpecification and charSpecRelationship respectively. etc...

Is there any TMF recommendations on how we upgrade such changes which are not backward compatible?? We are looking for a solution which can smoothly transition the users who are using our v4 APIs to make them use v5 APIS.

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Bibinlal kv
Oracle Corporation
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Hi @Bibinlal kv

The TMF Forum API specification follow https://semver.org/. So from v4 to v5 there are non-backward compatible changes, this is normal.

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Olivier Arnaud
Orange
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Hi Bibinlal

There are some inconsistencies between the various V4 APIs as a consequence of different API owners from different CSPs modelling things in slightly different ways.  In V5 the APIs are strongly-typed, e.g. the characteristic pattern, and by introducing far improved TMF API tooling and reusing the API schema (in github tmforum-rand), the V5 APIs are now more consistent (reusing the same design patterns).  As a consequence though, there are some backward incompatibilities.  Typically, when upgrading to the newer V5 version, the API provider (ODA-C or otherwise) should continue to support one earlier version (V4) to provide sufficient time for all API consumers to transition/upgrade to the latest version.

Good luck!

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ROCHANA MACHAROEN
ADVANCED INFO SERVICE PLC. (AIS)
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