In the following post I want to discuss how to deal with empty or missing fields in messages from the perspective of the receiver. I will try to explain the problem with the following scenario. Scenario There is a ‘sending system’ which sends data in messages to a ‘receiving system’. In my example the sending system sends demographic data of persons to the receiving system. The sending system may be a patient registration system in a hospital and the receiving system a statistics tool. How the messages are sent is not relevant in this scenario but we can assume that the messages are […]