Does your current (old) iteration provide a query parameter to clients to let them specify the sort order? If clients had no sorting options before, then changing the only ordering available to them is definitely a breaking change. Any clients who want a consistent experience after your change will presumably need to add a query parameter - you are adding one for them, right?
I would argue that you had an implicit contract (default ordering = alphabetical) even if there was a query parameter available, but it's definitely less damaging because clients who felt strongly should have used it. If you did have such a query parameter, you could have made it mandatory and saved some pain, but that's water under the bridge.
You should unquestionably notify any API users well in advance of making the change, to give them a chance to update their codebases. I can't see any benefit to the business by surprising your clients in this fashion, and I can't see any good reason to make your support team's life harder.
Eric
On Thursday, July 7, 2016 at 12:57:24 AM UTC, Cooper Marcus wrote:Our API can provide a list of results - typically the list is large and the results are paginated.For the past few years, the sort order of the list has been alphabetical.We've never documented any particular sort order - it was just "accidental" that we were returning the items in alphabetical order.We've found that for performance reasons, we need to change the order in which the items are returned - the items will soon sorted roughly by their creation date.Is this a breaking change?I'm pretty sure it isn't, as we never documented any particular sort order. But... we were accidentally consistent, for many years, and now we will break that consistency - have we inadvertently created a contract with our users regarding the sort order?Assuming you agree that this isn't strictly a breaking change, would you nevertheless consider proactively notifying your users? Or is this something you'd just change, and let your Support colleagues handle any customer issues? (there are certainly pros and cons to both approaches ; )Thanks, Cooper
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In my opinion, you are not breaking a contract, [..] if your clients have business logic that depend on the sort-order, [..] you need to also provide your customers some time to re-tool their consumer applications to use the new sort-order.
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