A responseType field for all response classes

The inspiration for this blog post is API response in a video by Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot

A typical pattern for handling network assaults is Circuit Breaker.

A circuit breaker would replace a network delay or failure code with a fallback code, making the code resilient.

Ideally, the user is indicated when fallback data is used.

This can be as simple as adding a responseMetadata field within HTTP Response.

{
    content: {
        actualData
    },
    responseMetadata: {
        type: "STALE", // STALE, LATEST, FALLBACK
        updatedDate: "{dateObject}"
    } 
    ...
}

type could be

• STALE for old data
• LATEST to indicate the data is current
• FALLBACK indicates neither LATEST nor STATE.

an updatedDate field

• date of when something is updated

The frontend or client could read the responseMetadata and show a message to the user indicating that old data.

The client could also take further action on responseMetadata, like polling, after a little while until the response is CURRENT.

responseMetadata can be part of a parent class for all response classes. An ArchUnit test canenforce this behaviour.