Compatibility Checks (breaking change detection)
When BDC contracts are published to PactFlow, the consumer contract (Pact file) will be verified against the Open API Specification (OAS). In essence, PactFlow will ensure that the consumer contract is a subset of what is in the OAS. I.e., it will check that all the interactions in the Pact file are valid for that OAS.
PactFlow can only make a determination based on the information it receives. If the consumer contract does not contain all the interactions the consumer uses, then the resulting checks may say it is safe to deploy when it could not be because the missing API calls may have breaking changes.
The detail screen for the BDC interaction has different tabs that display the contracts involved and the status of the verification. The interaction could be in an invalid (or failed) state due to the following three conditions:
- The provider self-verification test results indicate that they have failed. This means that the provider build ran some tests against the OAS and the result was a failure.
- The consumer Pact verification results have failed. This means the consumer Pact tests failed, and the consumer is not compatible with the published Pact file.
- The consumer Pact file is not compatible with the OAS.
Contract Comparison
This tab will display the details of the comparison between the Pact file and the OAS.
Contract Incompatibility Messages
| Error Messsage | Description |
|---|---|
| Request accept header is incompatible | Pact request's accept header content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Request misses authorization header | Pact request's authorization header is missing |
| Request body is incompatible | Pact request's body content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Request content type header is incompatible | Pact request's content type header is incompatible with provider contract |
| Request header is incompatible | Pact request's header content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Request contains unknown path or method | Pact contains unknown request's path or method compared with provider contract |
| Request query is incompatible | Pact request query content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Response body is incompatible | Pact response's body content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Response body contains unknown information | Pact response's body contains unknown content compared with provider contract |
| Response request is incompatible | Pact response's request content is incompatible with provider contract |
| Reponse header contains unknown information | Pact response's header contains unknown content compared with provider contract |