As a third party Pipedrive app developer that does custom apps and integrations for different clients I would like Pipedrive to limit the amount of breaking changes in their API to only those that are absolutely necessary, for the benefit of ourselves and our clients (Pipedrive’s customers).
Over the past many months I’ve been seeing seemingly non-essential breaking changes being announced for their API. Changes, for example, like the one for discount fields which removed the discount_percentage field in favor of two other discount and discount_type to support non-percentage discounts. This is all fine and well if the API was in Beta or if it was a security issue where this change needed to happen, but the removal of this field completely breaks apps that have been working and depending on it for months if not years (like our case) when an addition of a field like discount_amount, or simply adding the new fields but not removing the original one, would have sufficed to support this new use case while not breaking everything that depended on it. Another option would be to deprecate the field, but not remove it from the responses.
As the feedback forum all I want to say is that pushing a breaking change with the reason being “because it makes our documentation more consistent” is not a valid reason to do so. Now we have to go call our client that’s had their sales process depend on these values for a long time and tell them that if they don’t make this change their whole process will stop working in a few months.
Please make an effort to only push breaking changes when there it is absolutely necessary.