I am developing a RESTful API that handle a GET request needing 2 parameters.
I try to explain better the use case: This API will return the latest price of a specific commodity (the commodity_id is one parameter) in a specific market (the market_id is the second parameter).
So what can be a valid URI template for this pourpose?
Something like this:
/latest_commodity_price/{commodity_id}/{market_id}
or something like this:
/latest_commodity_price/{commodity_id}?market_id={market_id}
or something like:
/latest_commodity_price?commodity_id={commodity_id}&market_id={market_id}
Or what else?
In RESTful ways your approach starts at the wrong position. REST means you are querying resources. So the URI should start with the resource you are querying your API for.
/commodity/{commondity_id}
Then you want to have a list of prices for a market. This sound like you query your API to retrieve a list of prices for the commodity:
/commodity/{commondity_id}/prices
Finally you are filtering the list of prices. I recommend doing filtering with the query parameters:
/commodity/{commondity_id}/prices?market_id={market_id}&latestPrice=1
Related
I'll give an example as the title might sound a bit confusing.
How to build a resource path for something like that:
GET /courses/?language=english&active=true/units
I want to filter the courses (not using an id as usually) and then get the units of this result. How would you do that? I guess using question marks between the path is not allowed.
That would depend a little on your DB schema of what is a "course" and a "unit". The whole point on using the RESTful way is to always build requests and urls resource-specific.
But let's say that one course has X units on it. Here's what i would do to make a RESTful path to that request:
Due to the path problem of filtering courses AND using the /unit suffix, it can be done by adding another query parameter that specifies what fields the request is supposed to return. Something like this:
GET /courses?language=english&active=true&fields=units
That would filter the courses, and then return only the 'units' field on the response. As i said, depending on your DB and models, if the units are not stored inside the courses, it would be a bad practice to get them by requesting a /courses path. In that case, first request the courses that match the desired filter, and then make another request to the /units context sending i.e the courses ID's as query parameters.
I have to design a REST API in which a search request can take parameters for multiple Queries ( i.e. when the client make a call using this API, he should be able to send parameters to form multiple queries).
We have an existing API where we are using GET and it takes multiple parameters which together forms a single Query and then this API call returns the response for this query.
e.g. currently I can pass firstName, lastName, age etc in the request and then get back the person.
But now I have to enhance this service(or have a separate service) where I should be able to send parameters like firstName1, lastName1, age1 to search person1 ; firstName2, lastName2, age2 to search person2 and so on.
Should I use POST for the new API and then send list of parameters(params for query1, params for query2 and so on)?
Or is there a better approach.
We are using Spring Boot for REST implementation.
Its better to use POST because GET is good for 2,3 parameter but when you have a set of parameter or object then POST is Good.
The best thing to do here will be do POST and then return a JSON object with all the details of the Person in an array.
That way it will be faster and you would not have to deal with long urls for GET.
Also GET has limitations regarding the length of the request whereas there is no such limitation in case of POST.
It is really hard to give a right answer here. In general sending a GET request does have the advantage that you can leverage caching easily on a HTTP level, e.g. by using products like varnish, nginx, etc. But if you already can forsee that your URL including all params you'll have to send a POST request to make it work in all Browsers.
RESTfull architecture should respect the principle of addressability.
Since multiple users can be accessed through a unique request, then ideally this group of user should get an address, which would identify it as a resource.
However I understand that in the real world, URIs have a limited length (maximum length of HTTP GET request?). A POST request would indeed work well, but we lose the benefit of addressability.
Another way would be to expose a new resource : group,.
Lets suppose that your current model is something like this :
.../users/{id}
.../users/search?{arg1}={val1};{arg2}={val2}
You could eventually do something like :
.../users/groups/
.../users/groups/{id}
.../users/search?group={id}
(explanation below)
then you could split your research in two :
first a POST on .../users/groups/ with, as proposed by other response, a JSON description of the search parameters. This request could scan the .../users/groups/ directory, and if this set of parameters exists, return the corresponding address .../users/groups/{id}. (for performance issues you could for instance define {id} with a first part which would give the number of users requested).
Then you could make a request for this group with a GET with something like this : .../users/search?group={id}.
This approach would be a bit more complex to implement, but is more consistent with the resource oriented paradigm.
I am following the jsonapi schema to return a standardised response from a web API. I want to reduce the number of HTTP requests to get related information so it looks like I want to use compound documents to return (for example) an article and two related comments.
I somewhat understand this but I am wondering what the RESTful GET request would be? I am thinking something like
http://api.mysite.com/v1/articles/1?comments=2
I like to be explicit but are the request parameters necessary in order to return related information from a resource?
Sound like you want /v1/articles/1?include=comments&limitComments=2
Where limitComments is an API-specific param (note member name requirements)
http://jsonapi.org/format/#query-parameters
http://jsonapi.org/format/#fetching-includes
Alternatively, you could /v1/comments?include=articles&filter[articles]=1&page[size]=2
See http://jsonapi.org/recommendations/#filtering
and http://jsonapi.org/format/#fetching-pagination
I have a resource which basically represents a number. I have two possible updates for this number: Set the number to a specific value or add a value to it. Now I'm confused if I can use the query string part of the URL to specify the desired behavior.
Something like this:
/resource/{id}/?mode=add
/resource/{id}/?mode=set
Or is there an alternative way two represent to update strategies for a rest resource?
An Alternative would be to extend the request body with this information but this since strange, since the request data should contain the data and not "meta information" for the request itself - as far as I understand REST apis.
The project is an ordinary angularjs (client) and java (server) project.
I am working on a REST service and so far all the queries are retrieved using a GET request.
Right now we are using a sort of routing rule like this one:
API/Person/{id} GET
http://api.com/person/1
Now, what if I want to ask to the REST API "Give me a Person with FisrtName = 'Pippo'"
I have a complex DTO that I called PersonQueryDTO that can be sent to the REST method to interview the database using the query criterias.
Is this a good way to do it or should I build complex queries in a different way?
For me it's important to keep the REST principles.
If you want to stick with REST principles, then the way to do something like that is to supply additional parameters in the URL e.g.
GET API/Person?FirstName=SomeName
REST is all about identifying resources, API/Person identifies your collection of Person and the additional parameters are nothing but meta data which the service can use internally to determine what sort of result to return.