I supposed to write an API to provide the data to the front end. I've the following screen with filters by Shift/Day/Week/Month/6Months.
Though it's completely my business logic, In general I want to know the best practice in providing data for such filters.
1) Should I provide an API for each filter on click on each tab? With this approach, I'll have to execute db query for each time based on the filter.
2) Or, Should I provide an API once with all aggregated data with filter keys? So that from front end, client doesn't nave to invoke further API's on each click.
In this case, I'll have to execute multiple db queries at one and provide the data to the front end.
What is the best practice to achieve this? I know these are all part of architectural design and I'm in a learing process. Need a valid suggestion or a useful resource.
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I'm designing a website with a REST API using Django Rest Framework and Vue for the front end and I'm trying to work out what the proper way to do filtering is.
As far as I can see, I can either:-
a) Allow filtering via the API by using URL parameters like /?foo=bar
or
b) Do all the filtering on the Vue side by only displaying the items that are returned that have foo=bar
Are there any strong reasons for doing one over the other?
The real answer to this question is "it depends".
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help determine what the best approach is:
How much data will be returned if I don't filter at the API level?
If you're returning just a few records, there won't be a noticeable performance hit when the query runs. If you're returning thousands, you'll likely want to consider server side querying/paging.
If you're building an application where the amount of data will grow over time, it's best to build the server side querying from the get-go.
What do I want the front-end experience to be like?
For API calls that return small amounts of data, the user experience will be much more responsive if you return all records up front and do client-side filtering. That way if users change filters or click through paged data, the UI can update almost instantaneously.
Will any other applications be consuming my API?
If you plan to build other apps that consume the API, you may want to build the filtering at the API level so you don't need to recreate front-end filtering logic in every consuming application.
Hopefully these questions can help guide you to the best answer for your use case.
Whenever I come across this issue I ask myself just one question: How many items are you working with? If you're only returning a few items from the API you can easily do the filtering on the front-end side and save yourself a bunch of requests whenever the results are filtered. Also, if the result set is quite small, it's a lot faster to do it this way rather than sending off a request every time the filters change.
However, if you're working with a very large number of items, it's probably best to just filter them out in the API, or even via your database query if that's what you're working with. This will save you from returning a large number of results to the front-end. Also, filtering large numbers of items on the front-end can significantly impact performance since it usually involves looping over a collection.
I have a search functionality that gets data from HERE API's Search endpoint. I maintain records of each search's results so I can add metadata that I need for my own purposes and also so I can provide results without always going back to HERE API. The problem I have is with paginating, specifically with providing a starting index when fetching results from HERE. Similar to how Algolia does it, I want to be able to search for a term and begin with the results at a certain index, the offset. HERE API apparently doesn't allow this at all. The closest it comes to such a feature is that it provides the URL for the next search, as described here. This is limited because it doesn't allow me to start the search results at a particular index that I specify. So essentially I want to know if there's a "standard" way of getting such functionality even when it's not provided by the API.
My own solution
The HERE API provides a size parameter that allows specifying the total number of results that I want, so I can specify a larger size than I need, and basically use code to start the results from my desired index. But this feels a bit hacky, and I wonder if there's a better/more established way of doing this.
Happy to listen to any ideas! Thanks. :)
Such a kind of an 'offset' for starting the paging after a specific number of results is indeed not supported by the Places API itself.
You have to set up a workaround within your application.
I would like to know about authorization in jUDDI. I would like to give Publisher capabilities to few of my clients And also I want few of my clients to inquire or access only those services which are related to them. I want to hide the rest of the services which are not related to them. Can we achieve this using jUDDI? and How?
As of right now, no. There is an open ticket for this to provide role, group, list, etc access control on a per record (business/service) basis but it hasn't been implemented.
This problem is also a complex one, since UDDI has both a search and a getDetails set of methods. Get Details in the easy one, but search is very complex. Filtering out records and keeping the paging option still functional would be a challenge
We are creating api on employee manage app. So there is schedule in interface, where we have to show all shifts in table, for every user per row. Farther, there is summary for every user (per row) and day (per column). Should we create one big aggregate call like:
GET /api/locations/{id}/shedule
which will return all employees, shifts, summaries etc. Or maybe should we smash that to several collections like:
GET /api/locations/{id}/shifts
GET /api/locations/{id}/events
GET /api/locations/{id}/summary
GET /api/employee/{id}/summary?date_from={date_from}&date_from={date_to}
For me, second option is more flexible and there is no reason to create new abstract resource, which is shedule. In my opinion it is clearly part of interface layer and should not affect on API design.
On the other hand the big aggregate is more optimal, becouse there will be less database calls and it's easy to cache.
How do you think? Is there any source, kind of article, which can I rely on?
There's nothing RESTful or unRESTful about either approach. The semantics of URIs is irrelevant to REST. What really matters is how the clients obtain the URIs. If they are looking up URI patterns in documentation and filling up values instead of using links, the API is not RESTful.
With that in mind, I'd say the approach that is more consistent with your business and your ecosystem of applications is the best one. Don't be afraid to create aggregate resources if you feel the need to.
I'm currently designing an API and I came a cross a little problem:
How should a URL of a RESTful API look like when you should be able to identify an item by either an ID or a slug?
I could think of three options:
GET /items/<id>
GET /items/<slug>
This requires that the slug and the ID are distinguishable, which is not necessarily given in this case. I can't think of a clean solution for this problem, except you do something like this:
GET /items/id/<id>
GET /items/slug/<slug>
This would work fine, however this is not the only place I want to identify items by either a slug or an ID and it would soon get very ugly when one wants to implement the same approach for the other actions. It's just not very extendable, which leads us to this approach:
GET /items?id=<id>
GET /items?slug=<slug>
This seems to be a good solution, but I don't know if it is what one would expect and thus it could lead to frustrating errors due to incorrect use. Also, it's not so easy - or let's say clean - to implement the routing for this one. However, it would be easily extendable and would look very similar to the method for getting multiple items:
GET /items?ids=<id:1>,<id:2>,<id:3>
GET /items?slugs=<slug:1>,<slug:2>,<slug:3>
But this has also a downside: What if someone wants to identify some of the items he want to fetch with IDs, but the others with a slug? Mixing these identifiers wouldn't be easy to achieve with this.
What is the best and most widely-accepted solution for these problems?
In general, what matters while designing such an API?
Of the three I prefer the third option, it's not uncommon to see that syntax; e.g. parts of Twitter's API allow that syntax:
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/show/id
A fourth option is a hybrid approach, where you pick one (say, ID) as the typical access method for single items, but also allow queries based on the slug. E.g.:
GET /items/<id>
GET /items?slug=<slug>
GET /items?id=<id>
Your routing will obvious map /items/id to /items?id=
Extensible to multiple ids/slugs, but still meets the REST paradigm of matching URIs to the underlying data model.