I am working on a small web app that stores user data locally using indexedDB which can be imported/exported by making use of JSON files. Since I plan on adding updates to the site, I want to know what best practices I should follow to make sure my app can allow importing of user data from older versions. It could be related to how I should define the properties of my user data object to make it future proof, or any library or tool I could implement that would make this migration process easier.
Do keep these points in mind:
- I am using NextJS to build this application and Dexie to manage indexedDB
- Without going into details, the user data file makes use of heavily nested objects and arrays and most likely won’t fit in a cookie or even in the local storage API
- This web app acts as a proof of concept which must only make use of the aforementioned core technologies, regardless of whether more efficient alternatives exist or not.
Two rules of thumb that I’ve found useful:
- Introduce a version field top-level. If necessary, you can introduce a version 2, but keep the parser for version 1 around.
- You want to err on the side of using objects in place of single values, because you can add fields to an object without breaking backwards compatibility.
I can’t speak to your framework specifically, but:
I’m assuming this is a REST API. I would suggest versioning the API, like
/api/v1for example.It’s funny, I’m currently dealing with this at work. The old API was just
/apibut on the backend we’ve mapped it toAPI::V1(Ruby). It gets a little pesky backporting things to the older API so it’s good to start with a solid foundation as much as possible.Something else I might suggest: use a good serializer and deserializer. You don’t want to muck up your models with crazy translations for everything: having a middle layer to perform that has been so, so beneficial to us.
Use Open API schema. You can define data models and endpoints or just the models, I do this at work. Then generate your code using openapi-generator.
Do you happen to do this in Ruby on Rails? I don’t know what happened but it seems like Swagger, JSON:API, and the serializers/deserializes are all abandoned.
For personal projects I use GraphQL for everything, I’m not a fan of REST these days. Let me define a schema and let clients screw around with the data. I just won’t waste the time anymore despite the performance impact everyone might cry about.
