Networking, caching, and remote state

Inputs

Identify endpoint and trust boundaries, HTTP contract, authentication owner, data sensitivity, cancellation owner, retry/idempotency policy, caching rules, and offline behavior.

Rules

• NET-001 — Validate the response contract. Check status, content expectations, decoding, and domain validity; receiving bytes is not success.
• NET-002 — Bound remote work. Limit concurrency, payload sizes, retries, cache growth, and pagination. Cancellation and resource cleanup must have owners.
• NET-003 — Retry only safely. Distinguish transport failure from authentication, validation, rate limiting, and uncertain writes; honor server retry/idempotency contracts.
• NET-004 — Protect secrets and transport. Use platform security defaults and appropriate credential storage. Do not bypass certificate validation or log tokens/private payloads.
• NET-005 — Expose remote state truthfully. Distinguish cached, stale, refreshing, failed, empty, cancelled, and authenticated states where they matter.

Workflow

1. Put network behavior behind a small injectable client boundary.
2. Map transport/HTTP/decoding/domain errors into actionable feature states.
3. Implement cancellation and latest-request checks at the publication boundary.
4. Define cache key, freshness, account scope, invalidation, and eviction.
5. Test controlled responses and real integration separately.

Verify

Test non-2xx responses, malformed/oversized payloads, cancellation, stale results, retry exhaustion, token expiry, pagination duplication, cache invalidation, offline startup, and account replacement.

Output

Return the client/state contract, security and retry decisions, deterministic tests, and unverified service assumptions.

References

Read the playbook for decisions, failure cases, and source links.

For transport, pagination, images, and cache identity, read the focused reference.