Damian Smedley wrote:
What is the usual approach taken in webservices to keep track of name changes in external software? Presumably just hoping people don't change them is not the approach being taken as that is doomed to failure. Is there some sort of format to represent the old->new name mappings that people typically use?
There isn't a way of coping with it, if the names / schema / signature of methods etc change you're screwed as a client. There's no reason I can see for the internal names to change anyway, the user visible names haven't changed so in this case it seems entirely unwarranted, who does it help?
I know it's not a property of biomart as such, it's a property of the way biomart is used but it's still an important point - we now have clients which can store queries, those stored queries should be made as stable as possible. There is nothing we can do about this, if we have a query stored and we try to apply it to the data set after the metadata has changed the query will be broken, end of story.
Cheers, Tom
