Have you been burned by versioning enums (repost)

I did decide to do one repost, just to be sure everyone got a chance to give feedback...

Kit George is working on a guideline around versioning wrt Enums and he needs your feedback.

It’s a know issue that adding values to enums is bad (from a breaking change perspective), WHEN someone is exhaustively switching over that enum. For example:

I have an enum, with three elements in it, and I have some API, which I have written to return a Color:

public enum Color { Red , Green, Blue };

public class Service {

public static Color GetColor() {

      // returns a valid Color

}

}

 

Someone consumes this enum by writing this (broken) code:

            Color c = Service.GetColor();

      switch (c) {

            case Color.Green :

                Console.WriteLine(“taking some action based on Green”);

                break;

            case Color.Blue :

                Console.WriteLine(“taking some action based on Blue”);

                break;

            default : // Just assume Red is the only other value

                Console.WriteLine(“taking some action based on Red”);

                break;

      }

 

The issue is: what happens when I want to add more colors to my enum? For example, I want to change Color, so that now, it has this definition:

public enum Color { Red , Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple };

 

Questions

  • Have you, or your team ever hit this problem with a managed API being updated in this way (an element added to an enum), and affecting your code?
  • Same question, but for an unmanaged API?
  • If you weren’t aware of this issue previously, do you think it might affect your code in the future?
  • What if we simply allow this kind of change: do you think it’s that bad?