HL7-FHIR accepting absolute foreign references on server - rest

In 2.6.3 Copying Resources and re-identification of DSTU1 there's a description of how clients may have to re-assign ids on resources pulled from a server. My question is what should be allowed when going in the opposite direction. I see no issue with accepting foreign absolute references when there's no re-interpretation needed (ie you accept the URI on POST/PUT and return the same URI on GET), but I'm wondering if they should be accepted if a re-identification is needed on the server side (ie you accept the URI on POST/PUT but assign a new id no the object such that subsequent GET's return a local relative URI).
Are there any guidelines in DSTU1 (or even DSTU2) related to this?
Example
The client POSTs the following:
{
"resourceType": "Patient",
"name": [{"text": "Irene"}],
"careProvider": [{"reference": "https://fhir.example.com/api/Organization/12345"}]
}
The client then does a GET and receives the following:
{
"resourceType": "Patient",
"id": "abc",
"name": [{"text": "Irene"}],
"careProvider": [{"reference": "Organization/987"}]
}
You can see that the server re-identified the Organization into a local reference.

There's no more material than what you already referenced. The material isn't meant to dictate the answers, only to suggest the kind of solutions that might be needed. Generally, then, it's not really possible to talk about what's allowed - except or one thing you mentioned: the server isn't allowed to accept a PUT and then not honor the PUT by moving the resource; it should reject the PUT and insist on a POST. But generally, the mix of clients, servers and middleware in an eco-system, I don't know that we can usefully make rules about what should and shouldn't happen

Related

Designing rest api for nested resources

I have the following resources in my system 1. Services 2. Features where a feature has the following JSON structure,
{
id: "featureName",
state: "active",
allowList: [serviceID1, serviceID2],
denyList: [serviceID3, serviceID4]
}
I am trying to update the allowList or denyList which consists of serviceIDs and thinking of using PATCH method to do it like below,
/features/{featureId}/allowlist
/features/{featureId}/denylist
/features/{featureName}/state/{state}
My first question is should I even include allowlist, state, denylist in the url as my resources are services and features, not the allowlist or denylist.
How should the rest endpoint look like?
After reading thread mentioned below I was thinking about restructuring urls as below,
/features/{featureId}
[
{ "op": "add", "path": "/allowList", "value": [ "serviceA", "serviceB"]},
{ "op": "update", "path": "/state", "value": false}
]
Lastly, the use of PATCH even justified here? or there is any better way to design the api.
Note: I have got some help from the thread REST design for update/add/delete item from a list of subresources but have not used patch often.
How should the rest endpoint look like?
The URI that you use to edit (PUT, PATCH) a resource should look the same as the URI that you use to read (GET) the resource. The motivation for this design is cache-invalidation; your successful writes automatically invalidate previously cached reads of the same resource (same URI).
Lastly, the use of PATCH even justified here? or there is any better way to design the api.
In this example, the representation of the document is small compared to the HTTP headers, and the size of your patch document is close to the size of the resource representation. If that's the typical case, I'd be inclined to use PUT rather than PATCH. PUT has idempotent semantics, which general purpose components can take advantage of (for example, automatically resending requests when the response to an earlier request has been lost on the network).
GET /features/1 by user1
PUT /features/1 //done by user 2
PUT /features/1 //done by user1
the PUT by user2 will not be visible for user1 and user1 will make an update on the old object's state (with id=1) what can be done in this situation?
Conditional Requests.
You arrange things such that (a) the GET request from the server includes validators that identify the representation (b) the server responds 428 Precondition Required when the request lacks conditional headers (c) the clients know to read the validators from the resource metadata, and use the correct condition headers when submitting the PUT request (d) the server knows to compare the validator to the current representation before accepting the new representation.

How to model a progress "resource" in a REST api?

I have the following data structure that contains an array of sectionIds. They are stored in the order in which they were completed:
applicationProgress: ["sectionG", "sectionZ", "sectionA"]
I’d like to be able to do something like:
GET /application-progress - expected: sectionG, sectionZ, sectionA
GET /application-progress?filter[first]=true - expected: sectionG
GET /application-progress?filter[current]=true - expected: sectionA
GET /application-progress?filter[previous]=sectionZ - expected: sectionG
I appreciated the above URLs are incorrect, but I’m not sure how to name/structure them to get the expected data e.g. Are the resources here "sectionids"?
I'd like to adhere to the JSON:API specification.
UPDATE
I'm looking to adhere to JSON:API v1.0
In terms of resources I believe I have "Section" and "ProgressEntry". Each ProgressEntry will have a one-to-one relationship with a Section.
I'd like to be able to query within the collection e.g.
Get the first item in the collection:
GET /progress-entries?filter[first]
Returns:
{
"data": {
"type": "progress-entries",
"id": "progressL",
"attributes": {
"sectionId": "sectionG"
},
"relationships": {
"section": {
"links": {
"related": "http://example.com/sections/sectionG"
}
}
}
},
"included": [
{
"links": {
"self": "http://example.com/sections/sectionG"
},
"type": "sections",
"id": "sectionG",
"attributes": {
"id": "sectionG",
"title": "Some title"
}
}
]
}
Get the previous ProgressEntry given a relative ProgressEntry. So in the following example find a ProgressEntry whose sectionId attribute equals "sectionZ" and then get the previous entry (sectionG). I wasn't clear before that the filtering of this is based on the ProgressEntry's attributes:
GET /progress-entries?filter[attributes][sectionId]=sectionZ&filterAction=getPreviousEntry
Returns:
{
"data": {
"type": "progress-entries",
"id": "progressL",
"attributes": {
"sectionId": "sectionG"
},
"relationships": {
"section": {
"links": {
"related": "http://example.com/sections/sectionG"
}
}
}
},
"included": [
{
"links": {
"self": "http://example.com/sections/sectionG"
},
"type": "sections",
"id": "sectionG",
"attributes": {
"id": "sectionG",
"title": "Some title"
}
}
]
}
I started to comment on jelhan's reply though my answer was just to long for a reasonable comment on his objection, hence I include it here as it more or less provides a good introduction into the answer anyways.
A resource is identified by a unique identifier (URI). A URI is in general independent from any representation format else content-type negotiation would be useless. json-api is a media-type that defines the structure and semantics of representations exchanged for a specific resource. A media-type SHOULD NOT force any constraints on the URI structure of a resource as it is independent from it. One can't deduce the media-type to use based on a given URI even if the URI contains something like vnd.api+json as this might just be a Web page talking about json:api. A client may as well request application/hal+json instead of application/vnd.api+json on the same URI and receive the same state information just packaged in a different representation syntax, if the server supports both representation formats.
Profiles, as mentioned by jelhan, are just extension mechanisms to the actual media-type that allow a general media-type to specialize through adding further constraints, conventions or extensions. Such profiles use URIs similar to XML namespaces, and those URIs NEED NOT but SHOULD BE de-referencable to allow access to further documentation. There is no talk about the URI of the actual resource other than given by Web Linking that URIs may hint a client on the media-type to use, which I would not recommend as this requires a client to have certain knowledge about that hint.
As mentioned in my initial comments, URIs shouldn't convey semantics as link relations are there for!
Link-relations
By that, your outlined resource seems to be a collection of some further resources, sections by your domain language. While pagination as defined in json:api does not directly map here perfectly, unless you have so many sections that you want to split these into multiple pages, the same concept can be used using standardized link relations defined by IANA.
Here, at one point a server may provide you a link to the collection resource which may look like this:
{
"links": {
"self": "https://api.acme.org/section-queue",
"collection": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression",
...
},
...
}
Due to the collection link relation standardized by IANA you know that this resource may hold a collection of entries which upon invoking may return a json:api representation such as:
{
"links": {
"self": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression",
"first": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionG",
"last": "https://api/acme.org/app-progression/sectionA",
"current": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression",
"up": "https://api.acme.org/section-queue",
"https://api/acme.org/rel/section": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionG",
"https://api/acme.org/rel/section": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionZ",
"https://api/acme.org/rel/section": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionA",
...
},
...
}
where you have further links to go up or down the hierarchy or select the first or last section that finished. Note the last 3 sample URIs that leverages the extension relation types mechanism defined by RFC 5988 (Web Linking).
On drilling down the hierarchy further you might find links such as
{
"links": {
"self": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionZ",
"first": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionG",
"prev": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionG",
"next": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionA",
"last": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionA",
"current": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression/sectionA",
"up": "https://api.acme.org/app-progression",
...
},
...
}
This example should just showcase how a server is providing you with all the options a client may need to progress through its task. It will simply follow the links it is interested in. Based on the link relation names provided a client can make informed choices on whether the provided link is of interest or not. If it i.e. knows that a resource is a collection it might to traverse through all the elements and processes them one by one (or by multiple threads concurrently).
This approach is quite common on the Internet and allows the server to easily change its URI scheme over time as clients will only act upon the link relation name and only invoke the URI without attempting to deduce any logic from it. This technique is also easily usable for other media-types such as application/hal+json or the like and allows each of the respective resources to be cached and reused by default, which might take away load from your server, depending on the amount of queries it has to deal with.
Note that no word on the actual content of that section was yet said. It might be a complex summary of things typical to sections or it might just be a word. We could classify it and give it a name, as such even a simple word is a valid target for a resource. Further, as Jim Webber mentioned, your resources you expose via HTTP (REST) and your domain model are not identical and usually do not map one-to-one.
Filtering
json:api allows to group parameters together semantically by defining a customized x-www-form-urlencoded parsing. If content-type negotiation is used to agree on json:api as representation format, the likelihood of interoperability issues is rather low, though if such a representation is sent unsolicitedly parsing of such query parameters might fail.
It is important to mention that in a REST architecture clients should only use links provided by the server and not generate one on their own. A client usually is not interested in the URI but in the content of the URI, hence the server needs to know how to act upon the URI.
The outlined suggestions can be used but also URIs of the form
.../application-progress?filter=first
.../application-progress?filter=current
.../application-progress?filter=previous&on=sectionZ
can be used instead. This approach should in addition to that also work on almost all clients without the need to change their url-encoded parsing mechanism. In addition to that he management overhead to return URIs for other media-types generated may be minimized as well. Note that each of the URIs in the example above represent their own resource and a cache will store responses to such resources based on the URI used to retrieve such results. Queries like .../application-progress?filter=next&on=sectionG and .../application-progress?filter=previous&on=sectionA which retrieve basically the same representations are two distinctive resources which will be processed two times by your API as the response of the first query can't be reused as the cache key (URI) is different. According to Fielding caching is one of the few constraints REST has which has to be respected otherwise you are violating it.
How you design such URIs is completely up to you here. The important thing is, how you teach a client when to invoke such URIs and when it should not. Here, again, link-relations can and should be used.
Summary
In summary, which approach you prefer is up to you as well as which URI style you choose. Clients, especially in a REST environment, do not care about the structure of the URI. They operate on link-relations and use the URI just for invoking it to progress on with their task. As such, a server API should help a client by teaching it what it needs to know like in a text-based computer game in the 70/80's as mentioned by Jim Webber. It is helpful to think of the interaction model to design as affordances and state machine as explained by Asbjørn Ulsberg .
While you could apply filtering on grouped parameters provided by json:api such links may only be usable within the `json:api´ representation. If you copy & paste such a link to a browser or to some other channel, it might not be processable by that client. Therefore this would not be my first choice, TBH. Whether or not you design sections to be their own resource or just properties you want to retrieve is your choice here as well. We don't know really what sections are in your domain model, IMO it sounds like a valid resource though that may or may not have further properties.

JsonApi method calls

How may I include, using JsonApi, links to methods in my Rest API?, for example I have something like this:
POST api/v1/customer/1/deactivate
POST api/v1/customer/1/activate
To activate and deactivate a customer correspondingly. How they should be included (or not) in my data object? The specification does not include something like "methods" section for the data object.
Updating based on your change and based on guillaume31's answer.
If it is truly an update to a resource then you should issue a PATCH to:
api/v1/customer/1
And with a jsonapi compliant body to update the resource:
{
"data": {
"type": "customer",
"id": "1",
"attributes": {
"status": "deactivated"
}
}
}
If the intent is to truly remove the resource then a delete may be more appropriate. Based on your description the PATCH may be the best path since the resource is still present and may be restored based on other calls
POST api/v1/customer/1/deactivate
POST api/v1/customer/1/activate
This is not RESTful. But the "active" state of a customer can be seen as a resource! So the simplest solution is the following:
PUT api/v1/customer/1/active # Activates customer 1
DELETE api/v1/customer/1/active # Deactivates customer 1
The PATCH solution described by #guillaume31 is also a valid approach, but implementing RESTful PATCH correctly requires that the change is described with operation, data pointer and new value (see also the JSON Patch RFC). That's probably overkill for this simple scenario.
By including "deactivate" as part of the URI, you're kind of making deactivate a resource, which seems incorrect. This IMO isn't REST level 1 compliant.
As I understand it, activating/deactivating a customer amounts to updating a resource. JsonApi recommends sending a PATCH request to modify a resource : http://jsonapi.org/format/#crud-updating
However, it would perhaps be more faithful to REST to model activation as a POST or a PUT and deactivation as a DELETE. You would benefit from PUT and DELETE's idempotency -- activating or deactivating a customer twice in a row should probably leave it in the same state. But it also depends on your domain and what consequences these actions have.
In the REST frameworks I know, verbs are not included in links out of the box. I doesn't seem to be the case with JSON API either.

REST: Update resource with unknown (server-generated) value

I have a resource foo with the following structure:
GET /foo/1 returns:
{
"id": 1,
"server-key": "abcdef",
"status": "expired"
}
Status can either be active or expired. If it is expired I want the server to generate a new one.
Normally I'd issue PUT/PATCH foo/1 with the new key, but client doesn't know the key-generation algorithm.
I could also do a POST foo/1/server-key with no body, but that feels strange (I know this isn't very scientific reason though).
Any good ideas/patterns?
In case when you've got expired entity just make POST call on /foo without any parameters and server should return new entity (and HTTP response code should be 201):
{
"id": 2,
"server-key": "xyz",
"status": "active"
}
If some resourece is expired it is unconvinient to make it active again by PUT/PATCH request.
The approach I would adopt is to set a null value to server-key and let the server deal with it, but I do that because it's a consistent behavior in my APIs for the server to fill missing values with defaults.
Other than that, a simple POST to the URI as suggested in the other answer is adequate.
I think that you should use a PUT/PATCH method in your case to ask for generate a token if expired. Generally it's not really RESTful to put an action name within the resource path ;-)
I would see something like that:
Get the element: GET /foo/1
If the status is expired, ask for a new server key to be generated: POST /foo/1. In this case, this method will be used to execute an action to reinitialize the key on the server side
Using the method PUT corresponds to update the complete representation with a new one provided by the client. With the method PATCH, you will do a partial update of the representation.
Here is a link that could give you some hints about the way to design a Web API (RESTful service): https://templth.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/designing-a-web-api/.
Hope it helps you,
Thierry

Best practice for partial updates in a RESTful service

I am writing a RESTful service for a customer management system and I am trying to find the best practice for updating records partially. For example, I want the caller to be able to read the full record with a GET request. But for updating it only certain operations on the record are allowed, like change the status from ENABLED to DISABLED. (I have more complex scenarios than this)
I don't want the caller to submit the entire record with just the updated field for security reasons (it also feels like overkill).
Is there a recommended way of constructing the URIs? When reading the REST books RPC style calls seem to be frowned upon.
If the following call returns the full customer record for the customer with the id 123
GET /customer/123
<customer>
{lots of attributes}
<status>ENABLED</status>
{even more attributes}
</customer>
how should I update the status?
POST /customer/123/status
<status>DISABLED</status>
POST /customer/123/changeStatus
DISABLED
...
Update: To augment the question. How does one incorporate 'business logic calls' into a REST api? Is there an agreed way of doing this? Not all of the methods are CRUD by nature. Some are more complex, like 'sendEmailToCustomer(123)', 'mergeCustomers(123, 456)', 'countCustomers()'
POST /customer/123?cmd=sendEmail
POST /cmd/sendEmail?customerId=123
GET /customer/count
You basically have two options:
Use PATCH (but note that you have to define your own media type that specifies what will happen exactly)
Use POST to a sub resource and return 303 See Other with the Location header pointing to the main resource. The intention of the 303 is to tell the client: "I have performed your POST and the effect was that some other resource was updated. See Location header for which resource that was." POST/303 is intended for iterative additions to a resources to build up the state of some main resource and it is a perfect fit for partial updates.
You should use POST for partial updates.
To update fields for customer 123, make a POST to /customer/123.
If you want to update just the status, you could also PUT to /customer/123/status.
Generally, GET requests should not have any side effects, and PUT is for writing/replacing the entire resource.
This follows directly from HTTP, as seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_PUT#Request_methods
You should use PATCH for partial updates - either using json-patch documents (see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-json-patch-08 or http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/09/05/patch) or the XML patch framework (see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5261). In my opinion though, json-patch is the best fit for your kind of business data.
PATCH with JSON/XML patch documents has very strait forward semantics for partial updates. If you start using POST, with modified copies of the original document, for partial updates you soon run into problems where you want missing values (or, rather, null values) to represent either "ignore this property" or "set this property to the empty value" - and that leads down a rabbit hole of hacked solutions that in the end will result in your own kind of patch format.
You can find a more in-depth answer here: http://soabits.blogspot.dk/2013/01/http-put-patch-or-post-partial-updates.html.
I am running into a similar problem. PUT on a sub-resource seems to work when you want to update only a single field. However, sometimes you want to update a bunch of things: Think of a web form representing the resource with option to change some entries. The user's submission of form should not result in a multiple PUTs.
Here are two solution that I can think of:
do a PUT with the entire resource. On the server-side, define the semantics that a PUT with the entire resource ignores all the values that haven't changed.
do a PUT with a partial resource. On the server-side, define the semantics of this to be a merge.
2 is just a bandwidth-optimization of 1. Sometimes 1 is the only option if the resource defines some fields are required fields (think proto buffers).
The problem with both these approaches is how to clear a field. You will have to define a special null value (especially for proto buffers since null values are not defined for proto buffers) that will cause clearing of the field.
Comments?
RFC 7396: JSON Merge Patch (published four years after the question was posted) describes the best practices for a PATCH in terms of the format and processing rules.
In a nutshell, you submit an HTTP PATCH to a target resource with the application/merge-patch+json MIME media type and a body representing only the parts that you want to be changed/added/removed and then follow the below processing rules.
Rules:
If the provided merge patch contains members that do not appear within the target, those members are added.
If the target does contain the member, the value is replaced.
Null values in the merge patch are given special meaning to indicate the removal of existing values in the target.
Example test cases that illustrate the rules above (as seen in the appendix of that RFC):
ORIGINAL PATCH RESULT
--------------------------------------------
{"a":"b"} {"a":"c"} {"a":"c"}
{"a":"b"} {"b":"c"} {"a":"b",
"b":"c"}
{"a":"b"} {"a":null} {}
{"a":"b", {"a":null} {"b":"c"}
"b":"c"}
{"a":["b"]} {"a":"c"} {"a":"c"}
{"a":"c"} {"a":["b"]} {"a":["b"]}
{"a": { {"a": { {"a": {
"b": "c"} "b": "d", "b": "d"
} "c": null} }
} }
{"a": [ {"a": [1]} {"a": [1]}
{"b":"c"}
]
}
["a","b"] ["c","d"] ["c","d"]
{"a":"b"} ["c"] ["c"]
{"a":"foo"} null null
{"a":"foo"} "bar" "bar"
{"e":null} {"a":1} {"e":null,
"a":1}
[1,2] {"a":"b", {"a":"b"}
"c":null}
{} {"a": {"a":
{"bb": {"bb":
{"ccc": {}}}
null}}}
For modifying the status I think a RESTful approach is to use a logical sub-resource which describes the status of the resources. This IMO is pretty useful and clean when you have a reduced set of statuses. It makes your API more expressive without forcing the existing operations for your customer resource.
Example:
POST /customer/active <-- Providing entity in the body a new customer
{
... // attributes here except status
}
The POST service should return the newly created customer with the id:
{
id:123,
... // the other fields here
}
The GET for the created resource would use the resource location:
GET /customer/123/active
A GET /customer/123/inactive should return 404
For the PUT operation, without providing a Json entity it will just update the status
PUT /customer/123/inactive <-- Deactivating an existing customer
Providing an entity will allow you to update the contents of the customer and update the status at the same time.
PUT /customer/123/inactive
{
... // entity fields here except id and status
}
You are creating a conceptual sub-resource for your customer resource. It is also consistent with Roy Fielding's definition of a resource: "...A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time..." In this case the conceptual mapping is active-customer to customer with status=ACTIVE.
Read operation:
GET /customer/123/active
GET /customer/123/inactive
If you make those calls one right after the other one of them must return status 404, the successful output may not include the status as it is implicit. Of course you can still use GET /customer/123?status=ACTIVE|INACTIVE to query the customer resource directly.
The DELETE operation is interesting as the semantics can be confusing. But you have the option of not publishing that operation for this conceptual resource, or use it in accordance with your business logic.
DELETE /customer/123/active
That one can take your customer to a DELETED/DISABLED status or to the opposite status (ACTIVE/INACTIVE).
Things to add to your augmented question. I think you can often perfectly design more complicated business actions. But you have to give away the method/procedure style of thinking and think more in resources and verbs.
mail sendings
POST /customers/123/mails
payload:
{from: x#x.com, subject: "foo", to: y#y.com}
The implementation of this resource + POST would then send out the mail. if necessary you could then offer something like /customer/123/outbox and then offer resource links to /customer/mails/{mailId}.
customer count
You could handle it like a search resource (including search metadata with paging and num-found info, which gives you the count of customers).
GET /customers
response payload:
{numFound: 1234, paging: {self:..., next:..., previous:...} customer: { ...} ....}
Use PUT for updating incomplete/partial resource.
You can accept jObject as parameter and parse its value to update the resource.
Below is the Java function which you can use as a reference :
public IHttpActionResult Put(int id, JObject partialObject) {
Dictionary < string, string > dictionaryObject = new Dictionary < string, string > ();
foreach(JProperty property in json.Properties()) {
dictionaryObject.Add(property.Name.ToString(), property.Value.ToString());
}
int id = Convert.ToInt32(dictionaryObject["id"]);
DateTime startTime = Convert.ToDateTime(orderInsert["AppointmentDateTime"]);
Boolean isGroup = Convert.ToBoolean(dictionaryObject["IsGroup"]);
//Call function to update resource
update(id, startTime, isGroup);
return Ok(appointmentModelList);
}
Check out http://www.odata.org/
It defines the MERGE method, so in your case it would be something like this:
MERGE /customer/123
<customer>
<status>DISABLED</status>
</customer>
Only the status property is updated and the other values are preserved.
Regarding your Update.
The concept of CRUD I believe has caused some confusion regarding API design. CRUD is a general low level concept for basic operations to perform on data, and HTTP verbs are just request methods (created 21 years ago) that may or may not map to a CRUD operation. In fact, try to find the presence of the CRUD acronym in the HTTP 1.0/1.1 specification.
A very well explained guide that applies a pragmatic convention can be found in the Google cloud platform API documentation. It describes the concepts behind the creation of a resource based API, one that emphasizes a big amount of resources over operations, and includes the use cases that you are describing. Although is a just a convention design for their product, I think it makes a lot of sense.
The base concept here (and one that produces a lot of confusion) is the mapping between "methods" and HTTP verbs. One thing is to define what "operations" (methods) your API will do over which types of resources (for example, get a list of customers, or send an email), and another are the HTTP verbs. There must be a definition of both, the methods and the verbs that you plan to use and a mapping between them.
It also says that, when an operation does not map exactly with a standard method (List, Get, Create, Update, Delete in this case), one may use "Custom methods", like BatchGet, which retrieves several objects based on several object id input, or SendEmail.
It doesn't matter. In terms of REST, you can't do a GET, because it's not cacheable, but it doesn't matter if you use POST or PATCH or PUT or whatever, and it doesn't matter what the URL looks like. If you're doing REST, what matters is that when you get a representation of your resource from the server, that representation is able give the client state transition options.
If your GET response had state transitions, the client just needs to know how to read them, and the server can change them if needed. Here an update is done using POST, but if it was changed to PATCH, or if the URL changes, the client still knows how to make an update:
{
"customer" :
{
},
"operations":
[
"update" :
{
"method": "POST",
"href": "https://server/customer/123/"
}]
}
You could go as far as to list required/optional parameters for the client to give back to you. It depends on the application.
As far as business operations, that might be a different resource linked to from the customer resource. If you want to send an email to the customer, maybe that service is it's own resource that you can POST to, so you might include the following operation in the customer resource:
"email":
{
"method": "POST",
"href": "http://server/emailservice/send?customer=1234"
}
Some good videos, and example of the presenter's REST architecture are these. Stormpath only uses GET/POST/DELETE, which is fine since REST has nothing to do with what operations you use or how URLs should look (except GETs should be cacheable):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pspy1H6A3FM,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXYw4J4QOU,
http://docs.stormpath.com/rest/quickstart/