Stateless protocol and specifications with standard REST operations like GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS, and TRACE, help to attempt for creating very high-performance, reliable Services/API/Micro-services. You can provide an upgrade path without making any fundamental changes to the existing APIs by versioning your APIs. is it a good practice to use verbs in some cases? I will argue two things. REST APIs use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to address resources. Usually you would write one script that catches all the requests. If I would like to fully understand how to use it, then I would read deeper. In the case where code is referring to a single resource, a list of one item is returned. In order to sort or filter a collection, a REST API should allow query parameters to be passed in the URI. Full form of REST API is Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface more commonly known as REST API web service. And in the post body, it can provide the name of the queue name network-upgrade-check. My situation is I have a resourcean item in a to-do listthat I want to perform different actions on. Also this maps seamlessly with auth scopes. Account id is some generated number (like primary key) for account record. Some fields (e..g hostname, IP address, etc.) Lets say you want to define the end-points for a College. Does that sound okay to you? Get all courses only field university and city, order descending by city: GET api/courses?_fields=university,university.city&_sort=-university.city, http://api.example.com/song-management/users/{id}/playlists. Can you enlighten me on what is true of false. Web developers are no strangers to APIs especially HTTP methods like GET and POST. (since everyone says that providing sensitive information in GET URL is not a good idea), 2. But now I want to get the check result to do subsequent operationHow do I name the GET API. Please note I am saying these ids to be primary keys in respective tables just me make things more relatable. That same API, when implemented incorrectly, may feel complicated and be challenging to use and comprehend. Token one can have many other tokens. Alternative 2 have all collections on the same level http://documents/{id} http://document-links/{id} A search that spans multiple documents: http://document-links?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION and we would still be able to filter inside a specific document (documentId=abc123) by adding one more filter: http://document-links?documentId=abc123&type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION. When it comes to designing APIs, backend engineers or API engineers are familiar with them as well. The most commonly used Elasticsearch REST APIs include Document API, Search API, Index API, SQL API, and Cluster API. REST APIs use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to address resources. The id in this example is: AB/124747 / B1 Is there a way to deal with this type of ids? They might just not be supported by a particular framework, e.g. My first idea was something like this: HTTP POST http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices. 1. We can identify customers collection resource using the URI /customers. You could do /v2/suppliers/id/{id} /v2/suppliers/code/{code}. 3) Filtering make sense on other parameters e.g. 3 Best Traits of REST API Architecture Design. So isnt this wrong? The parameter then gets parsed within your script. It was never meant to be used collectively. Probably not thats an oops. It is worth mentioning that hierarchical URLs may lead to problems if we (possibly at a later stage) want to enable filtering that span document-links of different document-ids. for previous versions: /document-template/versions -> then have a list of previous document-templates versions on this page? Option 1. Client then must send the token with each subsequent request. Like a pair of shoes. Avoid using jargon, use commonly used words. They are unnecessary and add length and complexity to URIs. Ensure that you use lowercase letters in your API URLs. 1) In REST, HTTP POST is more close to create. Lewis couldnt be more precise and logic about the functioning. Now, if the URL is as follows: It simply looks funny. And I will not be able to offer any suggestion without context. Are you simply referring to versions of documents? PUT /items/{id}/priority sounds good enough to me. I will leave this to others to share their thoughts. I have a question regarding resources with validity period. DELETE /teams/{team_id}/user/{userId} Once a new member is added or deleted, I will make a copy of the previous team for historical records. hth. OK, so not to use verbs, but what about adjectives? How can I get the filtered list of managed-devices with the name contains a string, HTTP GET http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices?title|like=phone. Introduction in any major breaking update can be avoided with the following /v2. So the server script could distinguish wether its an ID or a role/username/whatever. We will not get support in standards like OpenAPI and in many server-side implementation frameworks you would have to do some workaround because it does not fit with out-of-the-box functionality. Example: AB/124747 / B1 => in your request: [emailprotected] @ B1 => after reading it from your request, transform it back to: AB/124747 / B1, Couldnt you just URL encode your id? I dont really get into arguments with my fellow developers over this point, but it is still good to mention. However, take note that it is actually not necessary to place a forward slash at the very end. Since in the frontend clients shouldnt be able to set the ownerId and managers should, you must know the role for that (send it in the token). Hi, A question on resource path and naming best practice. I hope DELETE and PUT are depreciated! I personally prefer to use the filter _fields in query parameter to limit the fields i want to return from the backend. Detect JSON Insecure Deserialization (JID) Attacks in a String with Java, Swift 3 & 4 learning curve: 10 tips and useful links for your success, How to detect the Text Encoding of a File in C#.NET Framework, Deploy and Manage Production Rails 5 App with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, http://api.example.com/v1/users/Id/departments, http://api.example.com/v1/users?orderBy=name. Tech nerd. In addition, you would like to avoid causing confusion by avoiding abbreviations or shorthand as well. You don't get to hear something's name with a hash(#) or a pound(!) If i have resource(Folder) called Customers inside this should I create controller called CustomerController or CustomersConstroller ? Resources (URIs) Names and Verbs To describe your resources, use concrete names and not action verbs. For example I have this /groups/{id} resource I want to clone, but there is no such method or similar in HTTP, I could just use POST /groups/{id} with the fetched data of the group I want to clone but If I want to execute that in just one action, so I add /groups/{id}:clone . For . or still two? The first is *the* method of returning a single resource by its primary identifier. Build basic API and REST data backbones for web apps using Django. Account numbers are NPI (sensitive) data so I will never put them in URI/URL. The action should always be followed by the resource in the URL. Imagine that you introduce these special characters into your naming. Additionally avoid verb-noun combinations: hyphenated, snake_case, camelCase. With the above, the user is able to query a user based on their user ID. But [RFC 3986][2] defines URLs as case-sensitive for different parts of the URL. I will have a separate API for returning the status of long-running jobs submitted from any API in the system. Coming from a programming background, camelCase is a popular choice for naming joint words. No need to complicate this simple requirement. In the case of trousers and sunglasses, they don't seem to have a singular counterpart. locations, IP ranges etc. You mentioned, that we should not use verbs and its better to use nouns to present a resource (since nouns have properties similarly to resources which have attributes), However in the controller type you are using verbs to refer to a resource, /checkout. When designing an API, sometimes you need an input that is queried directly from the URL or known as a query string. More often than not, when you want to get an entity as the return, it is enough to just take in an ID as the input and then we do some magic data fetching from the database based on the requested ID and return the value. When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. Google recommends keeping all the keywords in the URL separated by a hyphen. One part still confuses me however: You recommend above to use the following for collections: But wouldnt the system just look at /users/admin and think that admin is a user ID? We should not use URIs to indicate a CRUD function. Here these names must be considered as a singular entity by their use. How can we represent such collection? since you are filtering products it looks like a query parameter instead of a path parameter. I was wondering is there a naming convention for secured resources (endpoint protected by login/password ?). If its useful for grades to exist independent from students, you can make grades their own collection. Pass required job request in the body. They must always redirect with a 302 or 301 or 307 to another endpoint. 2) accountIds in both URIs can be different numbers. This article is taken from the book Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3 by Biharck Muniz Arajo. In the above example, you can see, most parts of the URL will be consistent. http://api.example.com/products/v1/products, http://api.example.com/product-management/v1/products, http://api.example.com/product-service/v1/products, http://api.example.com/catalog-service/v1/products, http://products.example.com/api/v1/products, http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices?title, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework, https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/, https://www.freshblurbs.com/blog/2015/06/25/api-representations-prefer.html, https://api.mycollegesite.com/courses/2019/fall, https://api.mycollegesite.com/students/123456/courses/2019/fall, https://api.mycollegesite.com/courses/curriculum/2019/fall, https://api.mycollegesite.com/curriculum/courses/2019/fall, http://api.example.com/cart-management/users/, http://api.example.com/song-management/users/, https://hostname/api/v1/resource/AB/124747, https://hostname/api/v1/resource?id=AB/124747, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15196698/rest-resteasy-cutting-trailing-slash-off-path, https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluation.htm#sec_6_2_4, https://twitter.com/fielding/status/1052976631374000128, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/, https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/api-reference-index.html, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authorization/introduction?view=aspnetcore-2.2, http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/, http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/1, http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/2, http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/3, http://otac0n.com/blog/2012/11/21/range-header-i-choose-you.html, http://api.example.com/device-management/, https://fr.slideshare.net/domenicdenicola/creating-truly-res-tful-apis, https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/custom_methods. Excellent article, thank you for your hard work. To return all users with admin access, isnt better to use /users?role=admin ? Yes. In PHP the superglobal variable $_GET is used to access query string parameters. A store is simply a collection of resources where we do not create any new resource in the system when we add something to the store; or we do not delete the resource from the system when we delete something from the store. I have not come across such a discussion. Explore the key concepts that underpin API development and the principles of representational state transfer architectural style (REST) architecture. I have a button to increase priority and another button to decrease priority, both of which make a PUT request to my server. My question would be the reason why you have two URIs for the same resource? Do not introduce action verbs when they are not necessary. The main data representation in REST is referred to as a resource. It means when a RESTful API is called, the server. Use singular name to denote document resource archetype. Get to know RESTful API development. Is there a common convention on how to differentiate an internal service API (used by own clients) from the external API (used by other applications)? No. // change his password + Suggest: /auth/password, For getting devices, If you are admin, it should be: + GET: /devices // get all devices + GET: /users/{id}/devices // get devices of a user But if you are a user, who get his device + GET /auth/devices, Because we shouldnt add {id} in this path and verify {id} again with token. Hello, I am answering the second question. Thats two distinct URIs for the same collection resource ACLs. Separating words with hyphens will be easy for you and others to interpret. Roy Fielding writes: A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). For example, a Product API path can be specified as below considering also its versioning 1. http://api.example.com/products/v1/products or 2. http://api.example.com/product-management/v1/products or 3. http://api.example.com/product-service/v1/products. Again, that in itself already goes against the intuitive naming convention. If I were you, I would reconsider your stance on other HTTP verbs and study their purpose before committing to another non-REST, HTTP based API structure simply for convenience. But based on what tier was chosen, the availability/indexing/replication of logs may change. This guide will help you understand the REST fundamentals of building RESTful web services. If an API is composed of several services they should be named in a way to help discoverability. You may even debate with your fellow developers about the naming conventions themselves, which will then incur more time. RPC-based APIs are great for actions (that is, procedures or commands). This is usually a database primary key in our case. In this post, we'll cover the REST API architectural style (REST itself is not a standard), some REST API design and naming conventions, and introduce a standard related to REST that can bring a standard-like rigor to your APIs. When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. I explained in the first sentence of the comment. The actual URI naming conventions you use are immaterial, just use whatever you think looks nice and is easy for you to parse on the server. The only differences are where or how to put the versioning. Yeah, I know. Its possible to use an underscore in place of a hyphen to be used as a separator But depending on the applications font, it is possible that the underscore (_) character can either get partially obscured or completely hidden in some browsers or screens. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. Typical Spring boot example will look like below. None of the endpoints once published should return 404. URLs to retrieve collections of entities are based on the type of entity. POST need not either. What kind of resource is /v2/suppliers/id in this example? When I think about this, it is more like names that use common sense. Very good article, but I have a question. tickets/messages collection in a collection, shouldnt be like this tickets/{id}/messages?action=sendmultiple sendsingle. still trying to see how i can past all the /var1/var2/var3 into actual $array[0] = var1; then the part where i need to specifically do /var3?foo=bar and i would still get $_GET[foo]. You can use PATCH to update specific attributes within a message, or PUT to update the entire message. Is my method wrong ?? So the request will be: /users/email/verification /users/email/reset-password. 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. I find it pretty straight HTTP GET /managed-devices?name=NOKIA shall return all devices with name containing Nokia (case-insensitive). Or not? Obviously versions naming can be changed to whatever is more appropriate and I am just using it here to help communicate my point. So your /check API will run the checks and submit the progress to a JMS topic. As it is constrained to REST architecture, REST API is referred to as RESTful API. Sometimes, I like to add a forward slash at the end of a URL for no reason when accessing one. Moving the framework may affect the endpoint. The value of this header must map to one of the supported formats that the API supports. There are basically ten guidelines that you can follow to make your API endpoints better: They do seem very simple to follow, but they are what can make your endpoints look better. User can refresh the token prolonging the validity using the old, soon to expire token. As stated in the link, there are some considerations when doing this, like using only POST method, but is more clear this way when are you executing something or not. /api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/{device-id} /api.example.com/user-management/users/{id} /api.example.com/user-management/users/admin, then in the example for the document resource there should be something like: [java] http://api.example.com/user/{user-id} [/java], I think the document notation is that http://api.example.com/device-management/. Customers is like a collection of Customer resources. Any suggestions for this? It is more user-friendly when it comes to long-path segmented URIs. No reason to keep them. im not convinced that the internal definition of user resource is same as the external definition. They are just unnecessary. One way of modelling it is to allow only one role id, let the consumer call the API multiple times. So, the forward slash character represents this hierarchy navigation that becomes more specific as you traverse from left to right in the URI. In your API suggestions you list HTTP GET access-management/roles/{id}/acls and access-management/acls separately. Writes anything that helps or guides. A countably infinite set of resources bound only by restrictions on URL length. We have an endpoint /authenticate that requires Http Basic Auth credentials and generates bearer token. E.g. Feel free to add/remove fields as per design. It is good in the sense that you know it is referring to a parameter instead of the link itself at a glance. Hi, You say elsewhere that a resource should have a single logical URI. Query strings help us handle different requests on the same URL. Bad examples (Typical and Singleton resources): Good examples (Typical and Singleton resources): Do not use underscores. It was developed alongside HTTP and is most commonly used over HTTP. Let us say there is a single resource that we need to retrieve via two unique references (id or code) separately: *. You are talking about the current team, then delete the user from the team. Resource naming conventions in REST API design To properly design a REST API we should look into RESTful principles, these were first introduced by Roy Fielding in Chapter 5 of his dissertation on network based software architectures. But the example /customers/{customerId}/accounts/{accountId} could also be written /accounts/{accountId}, given that account IDs should be unique within a bank. Option 1: GET /documents/{type}/links?version=x&other=params, Option 2: GET /documents/{type}/{version}/links?other=params, Hello. How to naming of them correctly ? If you look at the https://api.example.com/users/1234 link, the 1234 is the userId here. Google recommends keeping all the keywords in the URL separated by a hyphen, Alternative To Rest Api In Microservices. However, one thing you always want to avoid is breaking your existing working APIs. First URI: Courses seems to be the collection and year & semester are filters. Is there a resource collection: /v2/suppliers/id or /v2/suppliers/code? The Elasticsearch REST APIs are exposed over HTTP. For example, /eth2/v1/validators retrieves all validators. Always make sure that your URIs are named with nouns to specify the resource instead of using verbs. PUT need not result in actual resource creation. // change password a user But if you are a user, who is changing his password, it should be: + PUT /{proper_word}/password. What you are looking for does exist, have a look at RDF at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework, FOAF: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ and DC: https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. Thats right, theres no good answer to that, because this is bad use of REST. It would be nice if there was a universally recognized Person class that I could extend to meet my needs. For REST APIs built on HTTP, the uniform interface includes using standard HTTP verbs to perform operations on resources. A collection resource is a server-managed directory of resources. First. So I made a post API like this: Because the check is a time-consuming operationso its an asynchronous operation. /roles/{admin} which will return all users with admin access. You could also use the https server (Apache, nginx, lighttpd, etc) to split the parameter into different variables and pass them to your php script. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs. Try to position yourself as the consumer. I think it would be more readable if you remove send- from the URI. As there we use User objects, you can use University Object, where you can include all the details you need. Could you please provide a suggestion on: 1. if we were to use a sensitive information like insuranceId as a search criteria, should the search be made GET or POST? Common API documentationcan be extracted and applied to multiple actions, controllers, or all controllers within an assembly. 2) GET /leaderboard/{frontend}?packagename={packagename} looks more flexible to me because it gives you freedom to fetch 1-N packages in single call. Ideally, the name has to be something that represents a whole. It should be accept 1 to N messages. You have a list of all courses available to the students for Fall 2019. The URIs shouldnt indicate any CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. xMatters uses this strategy, and so do DevOps teams at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and many more. As a developer, you should be familiar with the reason: The forward slashes denote the URI hierarchy. Then POST /users/{userId}/verification-email will post the request for sending verification email GET /users/{userId}/verification-email will get the status of last verification email, timestamp etc. There is always a chance that new functionality will be added or some changes will have to be done to your APIs. Thanks. You don't see anyone buying a single shoe to have the URL as. It is better to use a parent name for the resource. Otherwise, in option 2, anybody could call the manager API and still create cars for others. I will also not recommend to use /{id} and /admin both for same API. File extensions look bad and do not add any advantage. What do you thing about => page 5 Archetypye collection : Could you explain the usage of PUT for a collection? So the URI is not unique. Video created by Meta for the course "APIs". In the response, I would include all the updated hosts and new status. Nouns do not have special characters. Do you have any other suggestions? Though, one suggestion is to have only one API "POST api/v1/tickets/messages". The URI would would be https://api.mycollegesite.com/courses/2019/fall, At the same time, you want to access the courses for which a particular student has registered for fall 2019. Most people should agree with the points above. They represent an entity on the server, so they must be named logically. But this would be better handled by a well-maintained framework, and Slim is the best Ive found on PHP for lightweight RESTful APIs. Next, URI does not limit the scope of what might be a resource; rather, the term resource is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. REST APIs use a uniform interface, which helps to decouple the client and service implementations. - aehlke Jul 21, 2009 at 14:33 Add a comment 31 The TRACE method performs a message loop-back test along the path to the target resource. I dont know if this approach is RESTful: 1- something.com/api/admins/some-resource 2- something.com/api/businesses/some-resource 3- something.com/api/users/some-resource, I would be more than happy to get some RESTful ideas, thank you . he/she is user 3). Because there is a high chance that your users would already be using those APIs, and if you make changes and push them out, your users will not be happy about it. Right now, I have a single route that handles both actions, but given what you said above about not combining everything, I want to split it into several routes. Using NGINX with Docker-Compose and DjangoThe Official Breakdown, http://api.example.com/v1/store/CreateItems/{item-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/items/{item-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/item/{item-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/vendormanagement/{vendor-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/vendor-management/{vendor-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/items.json, http://api.example.com/v1/store/employees/{emp-id}, http://api.example.com/v1/store/items?group=124. One of the very few that talk about a controller archetype. If I want to fetch all the document-links in a document based on the type and version. For roles Id use another way so no one gets confused. TLDR: drop the /{code} or drop the /{id}. When I have a product and a pricing domain and want to search for a product priced by pricing, how do I determine the uri? Here, the primary resource is Customer so CustomerController is a better name. POST /checkouts, and then GET /checkouts/{id} And if /checkout doesnt create any new document, but changes the state of the existing one, then it may be used as a verb, e.g. Versioning through URI Path http://www.example.com/api/1/products One way to version a REST API is to include the version number in the URI path. REST URLs Each element type on the server is represented as a top-level URL with a plural form. GET Read employee with employee id 8345, PUT Update employee with employee id 8345, DELETE Delete employee with employee id 8345. Rather I will go for /roles/{roleName} e.g. Also avoid api versioning in the resource. Additionally, there are about four more ways of doing versioning: This one puts the version within the URI but makes it associated with the domain, like so: This is very similar to the versioning placed at the end. With so many suggestions and naming conventions to worry about when building REST APIs, it is no wonder that sometimes it takes a long time to build one. To be RESTful, I divided the code for each of them. Functionally, both the paths do the same thing, such that hitting either path would have the same result (based on what API is expected to do), but the approach taken is different, which leads to some non-functional differences. Refresh the page, check Medium 's site status, or find something interesting to read. But all the common frameworks Ive seen (laravel, symfony, codeigniter) actually do in their php scripts for some reasons. to pull the {id} or {code} elements from the /v2/suppliers collections you want: /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers/{code}. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. Video created by for the course "APIs". Any API/application interested in the status of any Job, must subscribe to the correct topic/queue e.g. Tech nerd. The format I am using is: But there is no page for abc.com/tokens/5678. You can also let users know that updated versions of the API are accessible at the following fully-qualified URIs. A resource may contain sub-collection resources also. [csharp] /leaderboard/{frontend}/packages/{packagename} [/csharp], I have a requirement where within the hierarchical data one of the resource is a collection instead of single id. https://www.deddytandean.com/, Recent Developments in Software Engineering Research part2, Learning Notes on Designing Data-Intensive Applications (vii), How Aiven monitors your system performance, The most simple way to manage Subscription and one-off payments for your business, https://api.example.com/users/abcd-efgh-ijkl, https://api.example.com/getUsers/abcd-efgh-ijkl, https://api.example.com/users/1234/first-name, https://api.example.com/v1/users/1234/orders/2, GET https://api.example.com/users/1234 HTTP/1.1. A user could have a list of accounts and a separate URI for its address as you could consider addressing a separate resource. Hi, Great article, but i have a question. Not only must it be intuitive, but it also must be clear (which usually means just spell out the noun). What are the rules for identifying a complex resource by separating a url path? POST is not idempotent and allows for the creation of new resources with new identities, with this is not necessary for its use. In this case, I would use POST /batches/run because this would create a new batch (in the database) and then immediately run it. Learn on the go with our new app. Im a part-time developer, so I dont keep up with these types of issues on a regular basis: Is there any discussion of an API standards definition for base object classes? REST API Naming Conventions and Best Practices | by Nadin Pethiyagoda | Medium 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. Here is another example of an unclear one when trying to get the first name of a user: fn looks weird and not intuitive at all because it can be misinterpreted as function if you are as nerdy as me. The above operation does not fall under CRUD. MyModel.java . One workaround for this seems to be changing around the order you list your URLs in in your backend, putting the catch-all URL looking for a variable last. So, how do you tackle this? A store is a client-managed resource repository. POST /device-management/{id}/alerts/{id}/resend. I was thinking of following the Controller archetype as follows: /login and /logout are good enough for me. Except where noted, the following conventions apply across all APIs. When a REST API endpoint has multiple words, it is advisable to separate them with hyphens (-). It is not also an optional thing in the sense that a certain set of objects are meant to hit one-tier vs the other. I was looking at the usage of .htaccess. localhost:8080/api/product: // return 0 or N products maps to: getProductsAll() ; HTTP GET localhost:8080/api/products shall return all products. REST has much more flexibility compared to the previous generation of web services, namely SOAP. You can use JSON object to send data to the API. or getting the accounts for a customer. https://api.example.com/weather/v1./temperature /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers/{code}, *. JAX-RS. For managing URIs in a RESTful API written in PHP I recommend Slim Framework. Very good question. Grades could also be their own collection (maybe you want to get all grades for visualization?). As someone who does not know anything about your services, I would expect to be able to understand the basic use of your API just by reading the API endpoints naming. We can put actions in controller resources that are not logically mapped to any of CRUD operations e.g. REST API design patterns do exist, and you can benefit by adopting them. I wait for explanation/clarification of the admin, in case he had typos in those examples. Our REST APIs use the standard HTTP Method and URL naming conventions: ONAP Developer RESTful API Design Specification StackOverflow Best practices for REST API design Operations GET operations are idempotent. Hi there, Thanks for this rules list. I dont know how it is handled in Node.Js/Express, Java, ASP.net or other server side techs. /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers/code/{code}. Hence, it makes more sense to actually use nouns instead. However, in this article, we are going to talk about REST or RESTful only. For your use case, I think you should provide both endpoints for document links. Toni Maundes was just fine. REST API Filters and Sort. By using versioning. 2) Why somebody will filter a collection by device ids? You may implement the below design hints to achieve consistency: The forward-slash (/) character is used in the path portion of the URI to indicate a hierarchical relationship between resources. Documents being the key for access for document-links, the clients would call: /documents/{id}/document-links?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION, If they have specific type of links they are interested irrespective of , then they could call /document-links/{id}/document-links?documentId=abc123&type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION. 2. A very good guide on naming! HTTP GET access-management/roles HTTP GET access-management/roles/{id} HTTP GET access-management/roles/{id}/acls, HTTP GET access-management/acls HTTP GET access-management/acls/{id}. For example, using this sites terminology, will there ever be a standard Document for a Person base class, Location base class, etc? Or do we have to use querystring type Url like: GET https://hostname/api/v1/resource?id=AB/124747 / B1. -- Phil Karlton. More likely youll convert the entire URI into a string and use regular expressions to match predefined patterns that refer to a particular controller or controllers. That means REST is a term that is familiar. Saying it in a different way: Your API needs to be able to authorize the user to perform the task. I would not like to make N API calls to load one screen. And technically /checkout is a noun. It is right that URIs should be instructed to clients through hypermedia. Adjectives can be part of the query string. HTTP methods are technically verbs, hence GET, POST, DELETE, etc. The use of file extensions is simply seen as unnecessary in URIs. REST API Guidelines These API guidelines are used to guide design of the IBM's Watson Developer Cloud services, but may provide insight for other REST APIs as well. I think it is fair for the store archetype to use singular nouns. In such a case it can be confusing to read the endpoint. Example below, Requirement: Give me access control list for specific list of roles. Nice catch on the two examples of controller resource. When convenient, lowercase letters should be consistently preferred in URI paths. So from the above please let me know the preferred option or is there another way? For changing password: If you are admin, it should be: + PUT: /users/{id}/password. I have a question regarding the rest api. I am expressing my thoughts purely on assumption of your system. Always attempt to version your APIs. Would be better to replace the first URI by https://api.mycollegesite.com/courses/curriculum/2019/fall or https://api.mycollegesite.com/curriculum/courses/2019/fall. If you use hypermedia in API, syle of URI all the more doesnt matter for clients or users. Those would include the ID of the course, the grade, the grades for each homework, grades for each exam , The URI would be https://api.mycollegesite.com/students/123456/courses/2019/fall, Given that the resource returned by the first end-point is substantially different from the resource returned by the second end-point, should the resource name courses be used in both or is it better to have different resoure names? Or /v2/suppliers/code ? One option is to POST to the /message/{message_id} with a param such as action=forward as part of the payload. In my opinion, APIs are THE next major advancement interoperability, personal devices/cool-bells-and-whistles notwithstanding. No need to put id in request path, because it will be stored in session in the server. Anything you like that's consistent with your local spelling conventions. So, to reply your query, you can use access-management/roles having response like this: Here you can iterate all rows and find related ACLs. Get /products/1/calculate/pricing/a. Or please share an example if there is a gap. The resource can have actions specific to itself unlike "get", fetch, load. A controller resource models a procedural concept. In REST, the primary data representation is called resource. This is a problem Ive run into before, and is actually what I was researching when I came across this post As soon as you allow resources/{variable}, you can no longer put any controller verbs or anything after /resources/ because itll get interpreted as your variable. Coming up with the correct noun is important for the resource in the picture. Some of the popular frameworks add extensions to the URL. Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace but still there MUST be some design at server side which will create those hypermedia links in some standard structure. Long story short, people do have guidelines that they tend to agree with. REST API conventions The IBM UrbanCode Release REST API follows a set of conventions to make interacting with it more consistent. I got a doubt nowfor I am doing an upgrade operation now. There are edge cases. POST /orders/{id}/checkout. Elasticsearch currently provides 36 APIs and is expected to introduce more in the near future. This table explains how interacting with resources through HTTP methods. Is that workaround in fact standard practice? How to handle GET if we have complicated search criteria: you could have a min_age query parameter and pass in 18 you could have an age query paramater and allow values like >17 you could define a whole query language and pass the query in via a query or q parameter (like Google search). Great article thank you, I have a question for naming of resource: There are two api in my project. RESTful URI should refer to a resource that is a thing (noun) instead of referring to an action (verb) because nouns have properties that verbs do not have similarly, resources have attributes. It is said that REST is an architecture and not a standard. For 2.1.4. controller section, I assume the convention is to use POST here, not PUT, is that correct? Content-type requirements edit The type of the content sent in a request body must be specified using the Content-Type header. This example says that it retrieves the first name of the user with the ID 1234. Removing them decreases the length of URIs as well. This article covers two important best practices for REST and RESTful APIs: Naming conventions and API Versioning. I think its a bad nameWhats your opinion Sorry for my poor English, Thanks for any suggestions. Use plural when possible unless they are singleton resources. I like to use this way of calling custom methods or what you call controllers. However, it is up to the collection resource to choose to create a new resource or not. How to name Controller ? If you need to keep the /, just replace it with something else for your request, as Admin suggested, and then when you retrieve it, parse it and replace that other symbol with / again. Also, because URLs can only be sent and received using the ASCII character set, your API URLs should contain only ASCII characters. Having a consistent and robust REST resource naming strategy will prove one of the best design decisions in the long term. It would be better IMO to include a status attribute in the cart resource and update that. Get to know RESTful API development. They have been used in other references as well. All these functions are POST, but If you have a resource name Message, you can only have one POST, http://yoursite.com/api/v1/messages/{id}/send http://yoursite.com/api/v1/messages/{id}/redirect http://yoursite.com/api/v1/messages/{id}/redirect-to-message http://yoursite.com/api/v1/messages/{id}/forward HTTP POST http://yoursite.com/api/v1/messages/{id}. All restful web services have an URL to access them. Use plural name to denote store resource archetype. Should Developers Generalize or Specialize? Refresh the page, check Medium 's site status, or find. Not just at the end of the url, avoid extensions anywhere in the url. Furthermore, use query parameters for data types and don't use a trailing slash. Clients may propose new resources to be added to a collection. The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Now, a resource can have a lot of data, so plural nouns make more sense. Understanding the RESTful API naming conventions will help you a lot with designing your API in an organized manner. These standards should be required for every URI naming process. Also, the browser would tell you that the URL is using the GET method if you inspect, so there is no need to add the action word to your URI. Then it would be best if you always targeted to put a resource into one archetype and then use its naming convention consistently. Thank you for a very interesting article. For those usecases, use query parameters. Your API sould use: /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers?code={code}, What about really singular document URI: /v2/supplier/{id} /v2/suppliers?code=}code}, And then you can also have a qualified collections, that does not mix itself up with single resource identifier: /v2/suppliers/top. The second is the method of returning a list of resources, where any number of fields in the resource can be used to filter (there is also sorting and paging implemented as query options as well). Get /products/1/pricing/a 2. The URLs map to their respective endpoint handler. Someone has to name those URLs. header, to determine how to process the bodys content. I was thinking: PUT /items/{id}/increase-priority PUT /items/{id}/decrease-priority. Even if the action is important, cant we conclude that on the server-side by comparing the last stored priority in DB and the latest priority in the PUT request? The RFC 3986 specification for URI standards also denotes that URIs are case-sensitive (except for the scheme and host components of the URL). Learn on the go with our new app. I agree with Jorge. When naming your URIs, it is advised to use nouns instead of verbs or adjectives. api.example.com/index.php device-management/index.php managed-devices/index.php {device-id}/index.php, i got a feeling im getting this wrong. Eg. POST /events I also used this API to trigger an event in the system as part of any API completion or anything else. You can think of a store as a shopping cart. This is to specify the association between the action and the resource. RESTful URI should refer to a resource that is a thing (noun) instead of referring to an action (verb). Depending on the framework used these URLs are defined in the code or configuration. Search criteria should be public information, so if youre searching on something that is not public, you might want to take another look at your requirements. REST API designers should create URIs that convey a REST APIs resource model to the potential clients of the API. When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. It would be in the case where one wishes to replace ALL documents. Now that takes a camelCase out of the window. 1) Account Id and account number are two different things. You me like this->https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven. Why? The URLs that you have typically encountered have the following syntax: Well, you get what I mean. This is not specific to resource naming guidelines but an important concept while designing your API.Our REST API naming should be self-describing and as simple as possible.One of the important principle while naming our API is to allow developers to work on it without referring to the documents for every point. Instead, each stored resource has a URI. {id} and {code} have no collection to belong to. So /device-management/managed-dives would be a parameter, not actual folders. http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/{device-id}, meaning? So try to avoid using characters like %20 in your naming, as those have other meanings already. The problem with your logic is that collections arent the only resource that can act as a directory. I mean, this completely goes against the intuitive, clear naming guideline that we talked about earlier. Its mentioned, that you should not use verbs for CRUD operations, while controller is some procedure in excess of CRUD functional. Hence, if you use something weird or unclear (i.e. In my opinion, this is also why you should use plural nouns appropriately, as one should be able to tell which part is more generic and which part is more specific by glancing at the URL. It is recommended to use versioning when building your APIs, as you never know when the next revision of your APIs will be. /users/{userId}/ to get and set email. APIs are typically structured in a hierarchy. Instead it will return a document describing the admin role. As API developers we should ensure we use a consistent delimiter to make the resource name readable. Also, I will not put /user in the URL until I have a good reason for it. Great article, thank you! Wich pattern i can use in a model with a composite key? In database there would be an artificial ID for every resource, and ofc it could be a resource identifier, but what if I dont want to communicate with such resource identifier but with code instead? The URI was chosen by a client when the resource initially put it into the store. PUT /batches/{id}/send. bookmarks) again and again over the time. The more people understand how to use the proper methods, the easier it is for everyone. The version number should be v1, v2, etc., as users should only care about major changes thus, major versions only. This is how the User class looks like. Remember the API endpoint and its response is the GUI. Now, for the naming convention, it is advisable to use camelCase instead of others. HTTP is a standard, whereas REST is an architecture. Also, the names represent the contents of a resource or the resources themselves. and end_date attributes <p> filter=creation_date gt 2001-09-20T13:00:00 and creation_date le 2001-09-21T13:00:00 and and post_code eq 3000 - return a collection of resources where the creation date is greater than 2001-09 . Apart from the above reason, if you want to highlight the media type of API using file extension, then you should rely on the media type, as communicated through the Content-Type header, to determine how to process the bodys content. In the backend you can use the role in the token to validate the request, ex. Really helpful article, thank you for taking your time and writing this. Hi, Great article, but I have a question. I think the better option will be GET http://documents/{document-id}/document-links?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION Ps. Above you wrote, URIs should only be used to uniquely identify the resources and not any action upon them, but I thought this might be an exception to that rule. I know if I come across a partners API that uses POST for every operation I tend to roll my eyes and it gives me the impression that they dont quite know what theyre doing. This should tie into the user in the backend and the server should be able to determine if the current user is an admin / business owner / typical user, so there really should just be one endpoint. Change in an API is inevitable as our knowledge and experience of a system improve. /document-templates/{id} would return only currently valid resource and if not valid resource is required, then it could be accessible through /document-templates?code=doc1&validAt=2021-01-01T15:00:00. or is it correct that resource has no resource identifier and there is no endpoint /document-templates/{id} and if you want a resource you have to search for it using query params? I will suggest to append token ids using hyphen. From my point of view, option 3 works the best: http://api.example.com/product-service/v1/products Other alternatives: http://api.example.com/catalog-service/v1/products http://products.example.com/api/v1/products. RESTful Resource Naming Resource Naming In addition to utilizing the HTTP verbs appropriately, resource naming is arguably the most debated and most important concept to grasp when creating an understandable, easily leveraged Web service API. vague names), your consumers definitely will not be able to understand from the very beginning and you would be in trouble. I will suggest to use HTTP GET with query parameters. More importantly, if I consumed someone elses API, I would know that their RegisteredUser class, for example, extends this Person base class as well. HTTP GET http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices?states=CA,LS HTTP GET http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices?ip-range=127-0-0-1,127-0-0-10 HTTP GET http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices?routes=route1,route2,route3. I think it is convenient to use only Post and Get. whose job is to dump the log into the system. Here is an example. So you have /users/{userId}/accounts and /users/{userId}/address, therefore /users/{userId} is also a directory even though it only represents a singular resource, not a collection. The /internal/users route or endpoint is placed in web.php file, while /api/v1/users is placed in api.php. Using verbs in the URL like "getting", "fetch", "find", "load" are a bad idea since HTTP has methods to do that for us. Your case is a common one that in Laravel framework for PHP, it is handled by separating them in two files : web.php and api.php. if role is client the ownerid must be equal to assignerId if not the client could be hacking the API request. Suchen. Is it a good solution? You will see a deeper explanation of how these plural nouns make sense in a later point about hierarchy. Though not very widely used. Often, you will encounter requirements where you will need a collection of resources sorted, filtered, or limited based on some specific resource attribute. We use string type IDs which could include special characters like the forward slash. Service names. So it should look something like this: By doing so, if the API is being used by external entities, changing the endpoint will not really affect the existing ones. send redirect forward etc are verbs. I would have an email field in the user table. Its also possible to have only numeric IDs. https://cloud.google.com/apis/design/custom_methods. role-based resource-based claims-based and more https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authorization/introduction?view=aspnetcore-2.2. While REST APIs are extremely useful, creating them can be a time-consuming process. See stackoverflow rest RESTEasy cutting trailing slash off @Path at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15196698/rest-resteasy-cutting-trailing-slash-off-path. Also, HATEOAS can be added to link to parent resource URI. Naming conventions . The uri I was thinking about is the two above. Following you this example would not it be rather relative to controller Archetype ? However, this has one the advantage that your API can be hosted on different servers. or perhaps I dont understand your comment. Therefore if in your case /checkout is used to create some resource, then it should be a POST request to the collection URI and the response body should return a document identifier which will be referenced for later usage, e.g. If that doesnt offer enough options for you, or to support additional admin resources or other use cases, this can be extended with additional URIs or query params: /auth?user={user_id} /auth?action=logout /auth/{auth_id}. Refresh the page, check Medium 's site. + /users/{id} -> get id from path + /auth -> get id from token. There may be another practical reason to avoid trailing slashes. They are commonly known and they appear to be singular by use. Its resources and other related operations should be quickly committed to memory by developers who deal with it consistently. Advertisements .yml. That also look OK to me. Excuse me, I have a question about hierarchical relationships. Im developing an API which has different areas to access; an admins area, a business area and users area. Hey, Regarding using query component to filter URI collection how should I do it if I want only managed-devices that has region field exists? 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