I did not realise the power of REST until I started using scaffolds in rails. This makes life so simple. Now everytime I try to develop a web application I only think of those 6 verbs. But I have a doubt. How is search related to REST.
Basically the search page which contain a form for the user to input a search term.
which verb does this come under? Is it list??
and what does the search results come under? show?
Search is GET on the collection with some fancy attributes:
GET /articles?q=RESFful+Architecture&in_title=1
Something like that.
There are plenty of resources on the subject, check out Handling arbitrary actions, on ajaxpatterns, for example.
If I understand what you are saying properly, the search page wouldn't be a part of the rest service, but would submit to it.
The search results would be a list of whatever the first class object you had defined was. The Uri would describe the resource that was being displayed.
Retrieving resources is always done with a GET
eg: GET /cars?term=hyundai+green
Related
I'm building a CRUD for users in my rest API, and currently my GET route looks like this:
get("/api/users/:id")
But this just occured to me: what if a users tries to search for other users via their username?
So I thought about implementing another route, like so:
get("api/users/username/:id")
But this just looks a bit reduntant to me. Even more so if ever my app should allow searching for actual names as well. Would I then need 3 routes?
So in this wonderful community, are there any experienced web developers that could tell me how they would handle having to search for a user via their username?
Obs: if you need more details, just comment about it and I'll promptly update my question 🙃
how they would handle having to search for a user via their username?
How would you support this on a web site?
You would probably have a form; that form would have an input control that would allow the user to provide a user name. When the user submit the form, the browser would copy the form input controls into an application/x-www-form-urlencoded document (as described by the HTTP standard), then substitute that document as the query_part of the form action, and submit the query.
So the resulting request would perhaps look like
GET /api/users?username=GuiMendel HTTP/x.y
You could, of course, have as many different forms as you like, with different combinations of input controls. Some of those forms might share actions, but not necessarily.
so I could just have my controller for GET "/api/users" redirect to an action based on the inputs?
REST doesn't care about "controllers" -- that's an implementation detail; the whole point is that the client doesn't need to know how the server produces a representation of the resource, we just need to know how to ask for it (via the "uniform interface").
Your routing framework might care a great deal, but again that's just another implementation detail hiding behind the facade.
for example, there were no inputs, it would return all users (index), but with the input you suggested, it would filter out only users whose usernames matched the input? Did I get it right?
Yup, that's fine.
From the point of view of a REST client
/api/users
/api/users?username=GuiMendel
These identify different resources; the two resources don't have to have any meaningful relationship with each other at all. The machines don't care (human beings do care, so we normally design our identifiers in such a way that at least some human beings have an easy time of it -- for example, we might optimize our identifiers to make things easy when operators are reading the access logs).
Currently, I have an API for showing a list of spots using this route: GET /spots
I also have an API which gets the details for a certain spot: GET /spots/{spot-id}
Now, I will be making another API, which shows all the categories of the spots. Do you guys know of a proper way to go about with this?
So far I have decided on using GET /spots/categories but my manager said it was kind of weird for the spots resource to have categories.
His current suggestions are GET /spot-categories and GET /spotcategories.
Also, for reference, I have database tables spot and spot_category.
Thank you!
I tend to agree with your manager, your spotcategories look like a different entity altogether, so as a resource it deserves a separate url. That being said, if the goal is to find the categories for a particular spot (as opposed to simply browsing through the different available spotcategories), you should only be able to navigate to them through the spots (presuming your API is on level 3 of the Richardson Maturity Model). As in a link from the spots to the categories (or simply embed them, depending on the usage requirements).
So you might end up with something like
GET /spots/{spot-id}/categories
Call me crazy, but I'm looking for a service that will deliver autocomplete functionality similar to Google, Twitter, etc. After searching around for 20 min I thought to ask the geniuses here. Ideas?
I don't mind paying, but it would great if free.. Also is there a top notch NLP service that I can submit strings to and get back states, cities, currencies, company names, establishments, etc. Basically I need to take unstructured data (generic search string) and pull out key information with relevant meta-data.
Big challenge, I know.
Sharing solutions I found after further research.
https://github.com/haochi/jquery.googleSuggest
http://shreyaschand.com/blog/2013/01/03/google-autocomplete-api/
If you dont want to implement it yourself, you can use this service called 'Autocomplete as a Service' which is specifically written for these purposes. You can access it here - www.aaas.io.
you can add metadata with each record and it returns metadata along with the matching results. Do check out demo put up on the home page. It has got a very simple API specifically written for autocomplete search
It does support large datasets and you can apply filters as well while searching.
Its usage is simple - Add your data and use the API URL as autocomplete data source.
Disclaimer: I am founder of it. I will be happy to provide this service to you.
So the general pattern for a RESTful API is to return a single object with embedded links you can use to retrieve related objects. But sometimes for convenience you want to pull back a whole chunk of the object graph at once.
For instance, let's say you have a store application with customers, orders, and returns. You want to display the personal information, all orders, and all returns, together, for customer ID 12345. (Presumably there's good reasons for not always returning orders and returns with customer personal information.)
The purely RESTful way to do this is something like:
GET /
returns a list of link templates, including one to query for customers
GET /customers/12345 (based on link template from /)
returns customer personal information
returns links to get this customer's orders and returns
GET /orders?customerId=12345 (from /customers/12345 response)
gets the orders for customer 12345
GET /returns?customerId=12345 (from /customers/12345 response)
gets the returns for customer 12345
But it'd be nice, once you have the customers URI, to be able to pull this all back in one query. Is there a best practice for this sort of convenience query, where you want to transclude some or all of the links instead of making multiple requests? I'm thinking something like:
GET /customers/12345?include=orders,returns
but if there's a way people are doing this out there I'd rather not just make something up.
(FWIW, I'm not building a store, so let's not quibble about whether these are the right objects for the model, or how you're going to drill down to the actual products, or whatever.)
Updated to add: It looks like in HAL speak these are called 'embedded resources', but in the examples shown, there doesn't seem to be any way to choose which resources to embed. I found one blog post suggesting something like what I described above, using embed as the query parameter:
GET /ticket/12?embed=customer.name,assigned_user
Is this a standard or semi-standard practice, or just something one blogger made up?
Being that the semantics of these types of parameters would have to be documented for each link relation that supported them and that this is more-or-less something you'd have to code to, I don't know that there's anything to gain by having a a standard way of expressing this. The URL structure is more likely to be driven by what's easiest or most prudent for the server to return rather than any particular standard or best practice.
That said, if you're looking for inspiration, you could check out what OData is doing with the $expand parameter and model your link relation from that. Keep in mind that you should still clearly define the contract of your relation, otherwise client programmers may see an OData-like convention and assume (wrongly) that your app is fully OData compliant and will behave like one.
I'm currently using the Jira SOAP interface within a C# (I suppose the language used here isn't terribly important).
Basically, I'm creating an API and a Winform that wraps some of the functionality of the soap service so that our Devs can programmaticly add bugs when something goes wrong in our application.
As part of this, I need to know the custom field IDs that are in use in Jira, rather than hardcoding them (as they are still prone to the occasional change) I used the GetCustomFields() method in the jira-rpc api then filtered it, so that all the developer needs to know is the name of the field, then the ID is filled in for them automagically.
This all works fine, but with one quite important proviso: that you login to the SOAP/RPC service as a user with administrative privaliges.
The Jira documentation indicates that the soap/rpc service follows the usual workflows and security schemes, however I can't find anything anywhere that would appear to remove this restriction on enumerating custom fields (and quite why in any instance you would want someone to HAVE to be an administrator to gain this access, especially as the custom field id's tend to be in Jira's HTML source is beyond me)
Does anyone know if I've missed a setting somewhere? Or if there is some sort of work-around for this, short of hardcoding the custom field id's?
Or is this a case of having to delve in to Jira's RPC plugin and modifying the source for it in order to give me the functionality I require?
Cheers
Edit for the sake of google/posterity
Wow, all this time on, and it looks like Atlassian still haven't changed this behavior.
Worked around this by creating a custom dictionary that logs in as an administrative user, grabs the custom fields and then logs out. Not ideal, but it should work 'til atlassian change things
You're not missing anything - there's no way to get custom fields via standard SOAP API.
In JIRA Client, we learn about custom fields in two ways:
We download issues via RSS view of the issue navigator, or via XML representation of a specific issue. If a custom field is set for an issue, the XML will have its id, class and value (values).
From time to time we inspect the content of IssueNavigator search page - looking for searchers for the custom fields. Screen-scraping the HTML gives us not only ids of the custom fields but also possible values for enum fields.
This is hackery, of course, and it may go wrong, so a good API would have been a lot better.
In your case, I can suggest two solutions:
Create your own SOAP (or REST) remote API plugin that will give you just that info that you miss from the standard API. Since you're seemingly in control of your JIRA, you can install anything there.
Screen-scrape the "New Bug" page for the project and type of issue you need to submit. You'll get all the info - fields, options, default values, which field is required.