I am trying to construct URL for the REST API that needs to use complex resource identifier
e.g. Get specific Course
GET /Courses/{id}
where {id} = {TermId}/{SubjectId}/{SectionID}
Is it acceptable to format it as below or there is a better way?
/Courses/{TermId}/{SubjectId}/{SectionID}
It's rather not acceptable, because it introduces confusion to the clients that use the API you provided. Basically / (slash) indicates a new resource. In this particular case you have Courses resources which has a particular resource with TermId which in turn has SubjectId and so on. This is not readable and not what client expects. I see two possible solutions here:
Use combined key, separated with - or other URI-useable sign:
GET /Courses/{TermId}-{SubjectId}-{SectionID}
Just parse such key on the server side.
Use other URI
GET /Courses/{courseId}/Terms/{termId}/subjects/{subjectId}/sections/{sectionId}
There are also other ideas, the one you suggested doesn't seem useable.
As I see it, you have two reasonable options:
Use a compound key, as #Opal said
Use a surrogate key (an arbitrary key with no relation to your three unique constraints)
The advantage to (1) is that the URI is human-hackable - assuming that the user remembers the order to put the values in and what valid values can be. If a significant use case is going to be students using these URIs to find courses online they might like to skip the search step if they have all the relevant information and just punch those values into the URI. If your response type is HTML, this is not unreasonable.
The advantage to (2) is that it's not human-hackable - REST is about discovery through hypermedia. If the response type is JSON or XML, humans aren't going to be using these URIs directly.
I would suggest supporting the following endpoints:
GET /courses?termId={}&subjectId={}§ionId={}
// all three parameters are optional. returns all courses that match the
// specified criteria - either a subset of the data or the full course
// data for each result
GET /courses/{courseId}
Related
I need an REST API endpoint which will return all the records having name starting with ABC.
The SQL query would be something like:
SELECT * FROM MyResource WHERE Name LIKE 'ABC%'
But how should I define the query string in the REST endpoint?
Using equal sign in the query string would not be appropriate, I think.
{Base URL}/myresource?name=ABC
Sofar I found following specification that can be used as base for the definition of the query: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-scim-api-12#section-3.2.2.2
Equals is fine provided you use correct naming. For this request you can define i.e. 'namePrefix' parameter that is self-descriptive.
But how should I define the query string in the REST endpoint? Using equal sign in the query string would not be appropriate, I think.
Using an equal sign in the query string is fine -- the world wide web has been catastrophically successful, and you'll find query strings with encoded key/value pairs being used for all sorts of things.
There's no particular reason to assume that the spelling of a resource identifier should necessarily match the internal implementation details -- in fact, the opposite is the case: we're supposed to be able to change how a resource is implemented without necessarily needing to introduce a new identifier.
There's a tremendous advantage to using application/x-www-form-urlencoded data as your query string: that's how HTML GET forms do it, which in turn means that pretty much everyone has access to at least one general purpose library that knows how to construct resource identifiers that use that convention.
But if you would rather forego that advantage in favor of some other concern, that's OK too; REST/HTTP don't care what spelling conventions you use for your resource identifiers, so long as the result is consistent with the production rules described in RFC 3986.
I have REST API URL structure similar to:
/api/contacts GET Returns an array of contacts
/api/contacts/:id GET Returns the contact with id of :id
/api/contacts POST Adds a new contact and return it with an id added
/api/contacts/:id PUT Updates the contact with id of :id
/api/contacts/:id PATCH Partially updates the contact with id of :id
/api/contacts/:id DELETE Deletes the contact with id of :id
My question is about:
/api/contacts/:id GET
Suppose that in addition to fetching the contact by ID, I also want to fetch it by an unique alias.
What should be URI structure be if I want to be able to fetch contact by either ID or Alias?
If you're alias's are not numeric i would suggest using the same URI structure and figuring out if it's an ID or an alias on your end. Just like Facebook does with username and user_id. facebook.com/user_id or facebook.com/username.
Another approach would be to have the client use GET /contacts with some extra GET parameters as filters to first search for a contact and then looking up the ID from that response.
Last option i think would be to use a structure like GET /contacts/alias/:alias. But this would kinda imply that alias is a subresource of contacts.
The path and query part of IRIs are up to you. The path is for hierarchical data, like api/version/module/collection/item/property, the query is for non-hierarchical data, like ?display-fields="id,name,etc..." or ?search="brown teddy bear"&offset=125&count=25, etc...
What you have to keep in mind, that you are working with resources and not operations. So the IRIs are resource identifiers, like DELETE /something, and not operation identifiers, like POST /something/delete. You don't have to follow any structure by IRIs, so for example you could use simply POST /dashuif328rgfiwa. The server would understand, but it would be much harder to write a router for this kind of IRIs, that's why we use nice IRIs.
What is important that a single IRI always belongs only to a single resource. So you cannot read cat properties with GET /cats/123 and write dog properties with PUT /cats/123. What ppl usually don't understand, that a single resource can have multiple IRIs, so for example /cats/123, /cats/name:kitty, /users/123/cats/kitty, cats/123?fields="id,name", etc... can belong to the same resource. Or if you want to give an IRI to a thing (the living cat, not the document which describes it), then you can use /cats/123#thing or /users/123#kitty, etc... You usually do that in RDF documents.
What should be URI structure be if I want to be able to fetch contact
by either ID or Alias?
It can be /api/contacts/name:{name} for example /api/contacts/name:John, since it is clearly hierarchical. Or you can check if the param contains numeric or string in the /api/contacts/{param}.
You can use the query too, but I don't recommend that. For example the following IRI can have 2 separate meanings: /api/contacts?name="John". You want to list every contact with name John, or you want one exact contact. So you have to make some conventions about this kind of requests in the router of your server side application.
I would consider adding a "search" resource when you are trying to resolve a resource with the alias:
GET /api/contacts/:id
and
GET /api/contacts?alias=:alias
or
GET /api/contacts/search?q=:alias
First of all, the 'ID' in the URL doesn't have to be a numerical ID generated by your database. You could use any piece of data (including the alias) in the URL, as long as its unique. Of course, if you are using numerical ID's everywhere, it is more consistent to do the same in your contacts API. But you could choose to use the aliases instead of numeric IDs (as long as they are always unique).
Another approach would be, as Stromgren suggested, to allow both numeric IDs and aliases in the URL:
/api/contacts/123
/api/contacts/foobar
But this can obviously cause problems if aliases can be numeric, because then you wouldn't have any way to differentiate between an ID and a (numeric) alias.
Last but not least, you can implement a way of filtering the complete collection, as shlomi33 already suggested. I wouldn't introduce a search resource, as that isn't really RESTful, so I'd go for the other solution instead:
/api/contacts?alias=foobar
Which should return all contacts with foobar as alias. Since the alias should be unique, this will return 1 or 0 results.
I'm designing a RESTful API and I'm trying to work out how I could represent a predicate with OR an operator when querying for a resource.
For example if I had a resource Foo with a property Name, how would you search for all Foo resources with a name matching "Name1" OR "Name2"?
This is straight forward when it's an AND operator as I could do the following:
http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1&Age=19
The other approach I've seen is to post the search in the body.
You will need to pick your own approach, but I can name few that seem to be pretty logical (although not without disadvantages):
Option 1.: Using | operator:
http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1|Name2
Option 2.: Using modified query param to allow selection by one of the values from the set (list of possible comma-separated values):
http://www.website.com/Foo?Name_in=Name1,Name2
Option 3.: Using PHP-like notation to provide list instead of single string:
http://www.website.com/Foo?Name[]=Name1&Name[]=Name2
All of the above mentioned options have one huge advantage: they do not interfere with other query params.
But as I mentioned, pick your own approach and be consistent about it across your API.
Well one quick way to fixing that is to add an additional parameter that is identifying the relationship between your parameters wether they're an and or an or for example:
http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1&Age=19&or=true
Or for much more complex queries just keep a single parameter and in it include your whole query by making up your own little query language and on the server side you would parse the whole string and extract the information and the statement.
I'm working on creating a REST API. Lets say the resource I'm serving is called object and it contains a number of properties.
Apart from requesting the entire set of objects like this
GET api.example.com/objects
I want to allow requesting a single object by providing either the objectid or objectname,
like this
GET api.example.com/objects?objectid=
GET api.example.com/objects?objectname=
What I'm confused about is, how should I handle a request like this?
GET api.example.com/objects?objectid=x&objectname=y
In this case, should I return a 400 Bad Request, or should one of the parameters take precedence over the other? How does REST define this behavior?
REST generally assumes there is a unique URL for a resource, so it would be:
GET api.example.com/objects/objectId
Parameters are commonly used for searching, so you would have something like:
GET api.example.com/objects?objectName=x
A better approach would be use a generic key in the parameter string to retrieve field values of your specific resource
GET api.example.com/objects/objectId?field=objectName,anotherField
It complements xpapad's suggestion, and can add scalable structure in how you define a consistent approach to your API design.
In the android Notes demo, it accepts the URI:
sUriMatcher.addURI(NotePad.AUTHORITY, "notes", NOTES);
sUriMatcher.addURI(NotePad.AUTHORITY, "notes/#", NOTE_ID);
Where the difference between notes and notes/# is that notes/# returns the note who's ID matches #.
However, the managedQuery() method that is used to get data from the content provider has the following parameters:
Parameters
uri The URI of the content provider to query.
projection List of columns to return.
selection SQL WHERE clause.
selectionArgs The arguments to selection, if any ?s are pesent
sortOrder SQL ORDER BY clause.
So, is there any particular cause for the design decision of providing a URI for that, rather than just using the selection parameter? Or is it just a matter of taste?
Thank you.
I thinks its so you can do more complex lookups without having to complicate your selections and arguments. For example in my project I have multiple tables but use the same selection and arguments. To filter content. By using the URI I don't have interpret the query, I can just switch on the URI. It.might be personal taste to begin with. But in more complex scenarios you appreciate the URI. You can also use * to match strings in the same.way you can with#.
I think it's mostly a matter of taste. IMHO, putting the id in the Uri is a little cleaner since you can make the id opaque rather than require the client to know that it actually represents a specific row id. For instance, you can pass a lookup key (like in the the Contacts API) rather than a specific row id.