Preserve protocol data integrity

When working with network protocols (like AMQP, NFS, or SMB), maintain the integrity of the original protocol data structures during serialization, deserialization, and transformation operations. Modifying protocol-specific data can lead to unintended changes in the service contract and unexpected behavior for clients.

For message-based protocols:

• Avoid mutating the underlying protocol representation when converting to language-specific objects
• Perform type normalization only on your application’s representation of the data, not on the protocol layer
• Document how special cases are handled when converting between protocol formats

Example from AMQP handling:

// Incorrect: Directly modifying protocol data
amqpMessage.Properties.ContentType = normalizedContentType; // Mutates original AMQP data

// Correct: Keep protocol representation intact, normalize only in your model
EventData eventData = new EventData(amqpMessage);
eventData.ContentType = normalizedContentType; // Only the .NET projection is affected

For file transfer protocols:

• Clearly document how specialized elements (like symbolic links, hard links) are handled
• Ensure consistent behavior across different transfer operations
• Preserve protocol-specific properties where possible to maintain compatibility