A good practice to name a PUT request is like:
/employee/123
What if I want to replace several employees? Is it a good practice to do so in single request? If yes, then how to name the url with multiple ids?
yes, you can remove multiple employs using a single URL
you can pass multiple ids like this
/employee=[id1,id2]
Related
Let's take the following resource in my REST API:
GET `http://api/v1/user/users/{id}`
In normal circumstances I would use this like so:
GET `http://api/v1/user/users/aabc`
Where aabc is the user id.
There are times, however, when I have had to design my REST API in a way that some extra information is passed with the ID. For example:
GET `http://api/v1/user/users/customer:1`
Where customer:1 denotes I am using an id from the customer domain to lookup the user and that id is 1.
I now have a scenario where the identifier is more than one key (a composite key). For example:
GET `http://api/v1/user/users/customer:1;type:agent`
My question: in the above URL, what should I use as the separator between customer:1 and type:agent?
According to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt I believe that the semi-colon is not allowed.
You should either:
Use parameters:
GET http://api/v1/user/users?customer=1
Or use a new URL:
GET http://api/v1/user/users/customer/1
But use Standards like this
("Paths tend to be cached, parameters tend to not be, as a general rule.")
Instead of trying to create a general structure for accessing records via multiple keys at once, I would suggest trying to think of this on more of a case-by-case basis.
To take your example, one way to interpret it is that you have multiple customers, and those customers each may have multiple user accounts. A natural hierarchy for this would be:
/customer/x/user/y
Often an elegant decision like this can be made, that not only solves the problem but also documents your data-model in a way that someone can easily see that users belong to customers via a 1-to-many relationship.
my REST API format:
http://example.com/api/v1.0/products - get all products
http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/3 - get product with id=3
Also, the products can be orginized into a product groups.
What is a proper way to get all product groups according to REST best practices:
http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/groups
or
http://example.com/api/v1.0/productgroups
...
another option ?
I can't agree with Rishabh Soni because http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/groups may lead to ambiguity.
I would put my money on http://example.com/api/v1.0/productgroups or even better http://example.com/api/v1.0/product_groups (better readability).
I've had similar discussion here: Updating RESTful resources against aggregate roots only
Question: About the thing of /products/features or /product-features,
is there any consensus on this? Do you know any good source to ensure
that it's not just a matter of taste?
Answer: I think this is misleading. I would expect to get all features
in all products rather than get all possible features. But, to be
honest, it’s hard to find any source talking directly about this
problem, but there is a bunch of articles where people don’t try to
create nested resources like /products/features, but do this
separately.
So, we can't be sure http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/groups will return all possible groups or just all groups that are connected with all existing products (what about a group that has not been connected with the product yet?).
To avoid this ambiguity, you can add some annotation in documentation. But you can just prepare http://example.com/api/v1.0/product_groups and all is clear.
If you are developing Rest API for your clients than you should not rely on id's. Instead build a meaningful abbreviation and map them to actual id on server side.
If that is not possible, instead of using
http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/3 you can use http://example.com/api/v1.0/products?product_id=3 and then you can provide "product_id" description in the documentation. basically telling the client ways to use product_id.
In short a url must be meaningful and follow a pattern.The variable part must be send by in the url query(part after ? or POST payload)
With this, method to querying the server is also important. If client is trying to get something to the server he should use "GET" http request, similar POST http request if it is uploading new info and "PUT" request if it is updating or creating a new resource.
So by this analogy http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/groups is more appropriate as it is following a pattern(groups in product) while productgroups is more like a keyword with no pattern.
A directory like pattern is more easier to understand. Like in file systems(C:\Program Files\WinRAR), every part gets us to more generalized target.
You can also customize this for specific group- http://example.com/api/v1.0/products/groups?id=3
I am trying to design a REST API for a system where the resources are essentially identified by path-like addresses with varying numbers of segments. For example, a "Schema" resource could be represented on the file system as follows:
/Resources/Schemas/MyFolder2/MyFolder5/MySchema27
The file-system path /Resources/Schemas/ is the root folder for all Schemas, and everything below this is entirely user defined (as far as folder depth and folder naming). So, in the example above, the particular Schema would be uniquely identified by the following address (since "MySchema27" by itself would not necessarily be unique):
/MyFolder2/MyFolder5/MySchema27
What would be the best way to refer to a resource like this in a REST API?
If I have a /schemas collection my REST URL could be:
/schemas/MyFolder2/MyFolder5/MySchema27
Would that be a reasonable approach? Are there better ways of handling this?
I could, potentially, do a 2-step approach where the client would first have to search for a Schema using the Schema address (in URL parameters or in the request body), which would then return a unique ID that could then be used with a more traditional /schemas/{id} design. Not sure that I like that, though, especially since it would mean tracking a separate ID for each resource. Thoughts? Thanks.
The usual way to add a resource to your "folder" /Resources/Schemas/ is to make a POST request on it with the body of this POST request containing a representation of the resource to add, then the server will take care of finding the next free {id} and and setting the new resource to /Resources/Schemas/{id}.
Another approach is to, as you said, make a GET request on /Resources/Schemas/new which would return the next free {id}, and then, make a second request PUT directly on /Resources/Schemas/{id}. However this second approach is not as secure as the first since two simultaneous request could lead to the same new {id} returned and so the second PUT would erase the first. You can secure this with some sort of reservation mechanism.
This is called as Resource Based URI approach for building REST services . Follow these wonderful set of video tutorials to understand more about them and learn how to implement too . https://javabrains.io/courses/javaee_jaxrs
I wonder what saying good practices create REST API. Should or not I create URI which will allow get e.g. several specific users?
For example I mean:
/usermanagement/users/{j_goldman,wafik,morder}
And this uri will be returns 3 objects users for j_goldman, wafik and morder.
You can do this but it won't be restful IMHO. If you really need to do this you should think about remodeling your resource selections say, all three users you want to get belong to a particular group with id 111. Then you can do something like /groups/111 GET. If you cannot then I guess you should stick with restful solution and use three API calls to get users separately.
What you are doing is searching for a specific set of users. With a query parameter within your URL, you can achieve this.
To return a single user (id is 5):
/usermanagement/users/5
To return all users:
/usermanagement/users
To return a set of users based on search:
/usermanagement/users?username=
That way, your API is open to searching by a specified criteria which can also be extended.
Say, you wish to search by location:
/usermanagement/users?location=
Say, you wish to combine these:
/usermanagement/users?username={criteria}&location={criteria}
You may also want to expose a search endpoint itself:
/usermanagement/search
You might find other options here too:
RESTful URL design for search
I mean the next situation
api/users - get all users
api/users/5 - only user with id=5
api/users/1,2,7 - here we have where_in('user_id', $ids); select in our back-end
I do only one request to server passing list of ids and DB using one select - returns all information that I need.
The main question: is it acceptable using REST this way?
If we want to get users with ids 1, 2 ,7 do we need one request or three.
Any suggestions.
Agreed, I would probably treat the 1,2,7 as query parameters and add to the request as part of the query string:
api/users?query=1,2,7
I would say no, because in REST, "Individual resources are identified in requests, for example using URIs in web-based REST systems." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer). So by passing in a list, your are not accessing individual resources, but a set of resources. Therefore, I would say no.