Versioning

The TrakRF API uses URL-path versioning (/api/v1/) with a strong stability commitment: within a major version, changes are additive only. This page spells out what "additive" means, how deprecations work, and which parts of the response shape are considered "closed" vs "open" — the distinction that lets clients stay forward-compatible.

Stability commitment (v1)

The v1 stability commitment begins at public launch. Field renames and shape adjustments that landed before launch — including the canonical id + external_key rename (Changelog) — are pre-stability vocabulary cleanup, not v1 breaks. Once launched, /api/v1/ is stable per the rules below.

Within /api/v1/, TrakRF commits to the following:

Will not change without a new major version:

• Endpoint URL paths
• HTTP methods on existing endpoints
• Required request parameters (names, types, shape)
• Response field names and types for fields currently returned
• HTTP status codes used for success and well-known error classes (see Errors)
• The response envelope shape ({ "data": ..., "limit": ..., "offset": ..., "total_count": ... } on list endpoints; { "data": ... } on single-resource endpoints; { "error": { ... } } on non-2xx — see Errors)

May change additively within v1:

• New endpoints
• New optional request parameters
• New fields on response objects
• New values in extensible enums (see below)
• New error type values

Clients written against v1 will continue to work as TrakRF adds features. Clients that treat unknown response fields or unknown enum values as errors will not — so don't.

Open vs closed enums

Enums on the wire come in two flavors, and the difference matters for client code:

	Closed	Open (extensible)
Stability	Set of values is fixed for v1	Set grows over time; new values may appear in any v1 release
Client handling	Safe to exhaustively switch/match	Must handle unknown values gracefully
OpenAPI marker	Plain enum	enum + x-extensible-enum: true

Closed enums in v1

These enum sets will not grow within v1:

• HTTP status codes — TrakRF uses the standard HTTP status set. Status code 200 means success, 400 means client error, etc. The set is closed even though individual endpoints may start or stop using a given code as the surface grows.
• Pagination envelope fields — limit, offset, total_count, data are the only keys on a list envelope.

Open (extensible) enums in v1

These are designed to grow:

• Error type (ErrorResponse.error.type) — marked x-extensible-enum: true in the spec. Current values are documented in the errors catalog; future values may appear in any v1 release. Clients should branch on HTTP status (closed) for retry/alerting policy and treat unknown type values as generic errors of that status class.
• Validation field codes (fields[i].code on validation_error responses) — current set is required, invalid_value, unknown_field, too_short, too_long, too_small, too_large, fk_not_found, ambiguous_fields, read_only. New codes may appear. Treat unknown codes as generic invalid-value and surface the message field.
• Scope strings (keys on API-key responses, scope columns in the UI) — TrakRF may introduce new scopes (e.g. reports:read, webhooks:write) in any v1 release. Clients that display the list of scopes available to a key must render unknown scope strings as-is rather than filtering them out.
• tag_type discriminator (Tag.tag_type on every tag variant; the oneOf discriminator mapping) — current values are rfid, ble, barcode. New variants may be added as additive minor revisions; integrators should treat unknown variants as forward-compatible and pass them through untouched. See Resource identifiers → Tag is a polymorphic resource.

The x-extensible-enum: true annotation captures intent but is not honored by today's mainstream OpenAPI codegen. openapi-typescript@7.x and openapi-generator-cli (Go, Java, Python targets among others) emit these as closed unions or fixed enum types; generated clients reject unknown values at parse time. Treat the annotation as documentation of TrakRF's stability contract, not as a generator hint — write client code against the unknown-value pattern below, and bypass the generated enum type when surfacing the raw type / code / scope string to your own logic.

How to handle unknown values in client code

The golden rule: never treat an unknown enum value as a server bug. Typical patterns:

# Good: fall through to a generic handler
def handle_error(err):
    match err["status"]:
        case 429: return retry_after(err)
        case 500: return retry_with_backoff()
        case s if 400 <= s < 500: return surface_to_user(err["detail"])
        case _: return generic_error(err)

# Bad: this breaks when a new type is added
def handle_error(err):
    if err["type"] == "validation_error": ...
    elif err["type"] == "unauthorized": ...
    else: raise UnexpectedServerBehavior()  # <-- don't

For TypeScript, type the open enum as "validation_error" | "bad_request" | ... | (string & {}) so unknown values remain assignable without loosening everything to string.

Deprecation policy

When an endpoint or response field is slated for removal, TrakRF marks it deprecated at least six months before the sunset date, following RFC 8594:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Deprecation: true
Sunset: Wed, 11 Nov 2026 23:59:59 GMT

• Deprecation: true — the endpoint is still functional but scheduled for removal.
• Sunset — the last date the endpoint will return 2xx responses. After this date, requests return 410 Gone.

The six-month gap is a floor, not a target. Breaking changes that can wait longer, will.

How clients should respond: log Deprecation / Sunset headers in your own monitoring so you get advance warning without constantly reading changelogs. When one appears, check the Changelog for migration guidance.

Current status: no endpoints or fields are deprecated at v1 launch. This mechanism is in place so future deprecations don't surprise integrators.

Major version bumps

A v2 would be introduced only for changes that genuinely can't be expressed additively — e.g. a restructured envelope, a changed auth model, removed fields. When that happens:

• v1 continues to operate under the RFC 8594 deprecation schedule (6+ months overlap).
• v2 is served at /api/v2/ — paths never collide with v1.
• The migration path is documented in Changelog before v2 ships.

No v2 is currently planned.

Seeing changes as they land

• Interactive reference — /api is regenerated from the Go handlers on every platform release, so it always reflects the running surface.
• Raw spec — /api/openapi.json or .yaml for diffing between releases with your own tooling.
• Changelog — Changelog lists public-API-affecting changes with added / deprecated / removed categories.

Related

• Changelog — release-by-release record of added / deprecated / removed
• Errors — error type catalog (an extensible enum in practice)
• Authentication — scope strings (another extensible enum)