Patent ID: 7100171

Claim:
A method of making a remote procedure call (RPC) from a client, the method comprising: installing on a client a first set of RPC structures, wherein each RPC structure in the first set of RPC structures comprises: a set of fields; and for each field in the set of fields, a version identifier, wherein the version identifier reflects the current version of a given field within the RPC structure and is independent of version identifiers for other fields in the RPC structure, whereby the version identifier for each field in the set of fields within a given RPC structure is used to identify a common set of fields between a set of RPC structures; at the client, comparing a first version identifier representing a highest version of a field of an RPC structure within the first set of RPC structures of the client with a second version identifier representing a highest version of a field of an RPC structure within a second set of RPC structures of the remote computing entity; transmitting a remote procedure call to the remote computing entity, with a first RPC structure of the first set of RPC structures; and before said transmitting, if said first version identifier is more recent than the second version identifier, omitting one or more fields of the first RPC structure from said transmission.