When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. 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. Sometimes, I like to add a forward slash at the end of a URL for no reason when accessing one. for example we have two types of users (client and manager), a car can be created by each one of them, but the manager can create cars for other clients, and the client only for himself. Its a simple PUT API where we pass the latest number associated with the priority. Controller resources are like executable functions, with parameters and return values, inputs, and outputs. 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. Thats two distinct URIs for the same collection resource ACLs. Additionally, you will also specify what HTTP method will be used for the particular API. There are four common ways to version a REST API. https://api.example.com/weather/v1./temperature We use string type IDs which could include special characters like the forward slash. Some of the popular frameworks add extensions to the URL. /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers?code={code}. GET Read employee with employee id 8345, PUT Update employee with employee id 8345, DELETE Delete employee with employee id 8345. For . Build basic API and REST data backbones for web apps using Django. A very good guide on naming! You will frequently come into requirements that call for you to sort, filter, or limit a group of resources depending on a particular resource attribute. What are the rules for identifying a complex resource by separating a url path? When convenient, lowercase letters should be consistently preferred in URI paths. Focus on resource naming. HTTP methods are technically verbs, hence GET, POST, DELETE, etc. I have a question regarding the rest api. The most common operations are GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. Then it would be best if you always targeted to put a resource into one archetype and then use its naming convention consistently. Now, if the URL is as follows: It simply looks funny. Rather I will go for /roles/{roleName} e.g. To be RESTful, I divided the code for each of them. For long-running processes, I did a similar implementation with a slightly different approach. Refresh the page, check Medium 's site status, or find something interesting to read. Hello, I am answering the second question. How could you do if you wanted an API that has the following functions with differents QueryString/ ParameterString/ Body/ Headers in a Messaging App? Top 6 REST Naming Best Practices by Deepak Mishra Last Updated: Jun 14, 2020 All restful web services have an URL to access them. Should I club 5678/2345 as 5678-2345 or using any other character? Players keep changing in a team, So I would have 2 resources historical/versioned team and the current team. https://api.example.com/weather/v1.0/temperature. For 2.1.4. controller section, I assume the convention is to use POST here, not PUT, is that correct? To create a customer 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. Avoid file name extensions. In the backend you can use the role in the token to validate the request, ex. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/ https://api.slack.com/methods https://www.flickr.com/services/api/ https://core.telegram.org/methods https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/api-reference-index.html. The use of file extensions is simply seen as unnecessary in URIs. We also have a code-style and repository guidelines, take a look Table of Content REST API Guidelines Naming JSON vs CSV vs XML JSON Structure Avoid Anonymous Arrays In REST, you can view it as a single resource inside resource collection. I am curious to know why you want to count the number of layers in the URI. I think the better option will be GET http://documents/{document-id}/document-links?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION Ps. Thats right, theres no good answer to that, because this is bad use of REST. To me, DELETE /accounts/{accountId} is good. Here are some examples: Last but not least, dont confuse your users by having inconsistency in your APIs. You can use PATCH to update specific attributes within a message, or PUT to update the entire message. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. A RESTful API would allow the retrieval of the checkout resource via, "GET http://api.example.com/cart-management/users/{id}/cart/checkout". If you look at the https://api.example.com/users/1234 link, the 1234 is the userId here. 1) If a frontend has many packages (in sinle screen) then GET /leaderboard/{frontend}-{packagename} does not make sense to me. Basically, when you look at the URL, you can tell that it is accessing the User resource with a particular ID as per the example. Excuse me, I have a question about hierarchical relationships. For example, if /device-management/managed-devices has two hierarchies, then how many hierarchies in /device-management/managed-devices/{id}? Long story short, people do have guidelines that they tend to agree with. Get to know RESTful API development. It typically looks clearer and hence more user-friendly than using underscores (_). // change password a user But if you are a user, who is changing his password, it should be: + PUT /{proper_word}/password. I have a question regarding resources with validity period. Probably not thats an oops. e.g. When it comes to naming, just thinking from the consumers perspective will help too. 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 . And if the API supports an id for the request, such as if the resource is asynchronous, you can technically query all such outstanding requests, and retrieve a request by id. Hence, it makes more sense to actually use nouns instead. Here is the summary of Naming conventions. 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. If accountId is an unique global identifier on system , and I want to DELETE an account which is better ? For roles Id use another way so no one gets confused. Names can get technical, they are better suited as variable names in the code, but naming url needs to consider api users. POST /device-management/{id}/alerts/{id}/resend. You can simplify it to links from document-links, as you want. 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. So as a general rule of thumb, we can use all adjectives as a query string. Elasticsearch REST API can be called directly or programmatically to give you access to its features. with my list of device-id in body, but you wrote that this URI is for create. 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. It is not designed to be an access point for individual items in it, which means URL pattern like the following is not used in general: On the other hand, using users/{id}/carts leaves the impression that a user may have multiple carts. REST APIs use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to address resources. But I dont think Nicks answer is good. Great article, thank you! REST API Naming Standards & Best Practices | by Nil Seri | Medium Write Sign up Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. So isnt this wrong? Hi, Great article, but I have a question. I will also not recommend to use /{id} and /admin both for same API. Very good question. A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). 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. Great article I have a doubt I have the next endpoints: localhost:8080/api/product: //can return one or more products given an array of ids maps to : (@RequestBody List
companyId). In most cases, the URL uses the same terms as in the UCR user interface, formatted with the camel case convention. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Web Application Description Language (WADL), then you should rely on the media type, as communicated through the. Finally, always follow a consistent naming strategy and standard API naming conventions. For those usecases, use query parameters. 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. Following you this example would not it be rather relative to controller Archetype ? ID seems the better of the two in this case. I like to use this way of calling custom methods or what you call controllers. We can identify a single customer resource using the URI /customers/{customerId}. A POST should always create a new resource where a PUT replaces an existing one. Hi Nick & Red, I also pay attention to this question. But based on what tier was chosen, the availability/indexing/replication of logs may change. My understanding A collection is not related to a specific ID. 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). Finally, these APIs is RESTful? The Elasticsearch REST APIs are exposed over HTTP. In the above example, you can see, most parts of the URL will be consistent. Using REST API naming conventions dramatically lowers the learning curve and makes it easier for new developers and third-party users to start with the API. Based on my experience, everybody I have met always uses lowercase words instead of uppercase. The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. See stackoverflow rest RESTEasy cutting trailing slash off @Path at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15196698/rest-resteasy-cutting-trailing-slash-off-path. In the response, I would include all the updated hosts and new status. My first idea was something like this: HTTP POST http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices. Explore the key concepts that underpin API development and the principles of representational state transfer architectural style (REST) architecture. Avoid using jargon, use commonly used words. The URIs shouldnt indicate any CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. Remember the API endpoint and its response is the GUI. These standards should be required for every URI naming process. In the case of trousers and sunglasses, they don't seem to have a singular counterpart. For uniformitys sake, resist the temptation to design resources that are hybrids of more than one archetype. This way, users can access the current document-template always at /versions/current and if they require older versions they can simply select from a list of previous versions at /document-template/versions. It means you need to manage authorization code on the client and in the API. It was never meant to be used collectively. You may even debate with your fellow developers about the naming conventions themselves, which will then incur more time. RESTful URI should refer to a resource that is a thing (noun) instead of referring to an action (verb). Your entire request should go via HTTPS anyway, so both the URL and the headers and the body would be encrypted. [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. Online-Abschlsse Abschlsse. Now, for the naming convention, it is advisable to use camelCase instead of others. i question the premise for external api, a stable contract and versioning is required. Account id is some generated number (like primary key) for account record. Also, a direct noun like users is understandable and clear. I am expressing my thoughts purely on assumption of your system. does it make sense to define a resource with an empty name, e.g. Get /products/1/calculate/pricing/a. Here is an example. In PHP the superglobal variable $_GET is used to access query string parameters. Option 1. Instead of creating additional APIs, enable sorting, filtering, and pagination in the resource collection API and give the input parameters as query parameters to meet this requirement. So try to avoid using characters like %20 in your naming, as those have other meanings already. Im here thinking about your database and how you have two unique identifiers for the same entity. which doesnt seem to make sense as a request. 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. display them on map, I would like to make only one request for the whole data. You me like this->https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven. or perhaps I dont understand your comment. In my interface I have a list of vehicles names and checkbox next to each of them. To return all users with admin access, isnt better to use /users?role=admin ? send redirect forward etc are verbs. 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. It is said that REST is an architecture and not a standard. REST API Versioning Last Updated : October 25, 2021 By : Lokesh Gupta To manage this complexity, version your API. I cant recognize how they differ through your URIs examples. Or not? Yes. 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. Hi, A question on resource path and naming best practice. This specification simplifies REST API service development and consumption. They represent an entity on the server, so they must be named logically. 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. 1. The name of the resource in the endpoint must use logical domain-specific nouns. For example, if we have users that can post, DELETE/user/3/post/5 should only occur if current user (via token) = owner (i.e. Content-type requirements edit The type of the content sent in a request body must be specified using the Content-Type header. I will argue two things. What do you think would be a good way to go? When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. $_GET[song-management] = users; $_GET[{id}] = playlists; $_GET[page] = song-management; $_GET[find] = users; $_GET[select] = {id}; $_GET[show] = playlists; im a bit lost in how the APIs URI should behave and how in php would think. He will use search functionality (text box) directly. 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. Excellent article, thank you for your hard work. 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. A convention allows you to: Define the most common return types and status codes returned from a specific type of action. locations, IP ranges etc. For the external API, a stable contract and versioning is required. Please, provide argumentation. All restful web services have an URL to access them. We should use HTTP request methods to indicate which CRUD function is performed. The above operation does not fall under CRUD. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluation.htm#sec_6_2_4, He also said: There is no such thing as a REST endpoint. Should this tier information be incorporated as part of the url or should it be placed somewhere else? Example: /users?location=USA to find all users living in the United States Lowercase letters and dashes By convention, resource names should use exclusively lowercase letters. Ex. 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. And in the post body, it can provide the name of the queue name network-upgrade-check. POST /jobs/{job-type} Creates an instance of a job and it gets processed by an asynchronous job handler in the backend. Hi there, Thanks for this rules list. In the above examples, 1 and 2 are the same but 3 is not as it usesMy-Folderin capital letters. Any thoughts on how to handle something like tiers/grades/reliability levels in the API resource naming? That means REST is a term that is familiar. Things like %20, which represent the space character, should not be used either. That also look OK to me. Saying it in a different way: Your API needs to be able to authorize the user to perform the task. Here is how it looks: This is also similar, as the three previous ways all use the MIME types thing. How can we represent such collection? Really helpful article, thank you for taking your time and writing this. In /accounts/{accountId}, it will be primary key for account record, while in second case it will be primary key which holds the relationship between account and customer. APIs are typically structured in a hierarchy. So, in that sense, it is important to fulfill the what at first glance. 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. Dont always think that your APIs are the final version and usable forever. You can provide an upgrade path without making any fundamental changes to the existing APIs by versioning your APIs. However, one thing you always want to avoid is breaking your existing working APIs. User can refresh the token prolonging the validity using the old, soon to expire token. The main data representation in REST is referred to as a resource. I think its a bad nameWhats your opinion Sorry for my poor English, Thanks for any suggestions. Then we must decide if the resource can be singular or plural. So, the forward slash character represents this hierarchy navigation that becomes more specific as you traverse from left to right in the URI. For a set of product ids, pass them as query parameter to filter i.e. 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. The following article will assist you in getting started when constructing the resource URIs for your new API. The API URL contains multiple elements. REST API standards 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. POST is not idempotent and allows for the creation of new resources with new identities, with this is not necessary for its use. What is the best way of modelling it? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. 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. You don't get to hear something's name with a hash(#) or a pound(!) How can I get the filtered list of managed-devices? As we all know, naming in software development is critical and also very hard at the same time. Session history for a user can be made available at: How do you actually logout of the RESTful API? Is it a good solution? If you see this presentation https://fr.slideshare.net/domenicdenicola/creating-truly-res-tful-apis. {id} and {code} have no collection to belong to. When resources are named well, an API is intuitive and easy to use. For example, customers is a collection resource and customer is a singleton resource (in a banking domain). So /device-management/managed-dives would be a parameter, not actual folders. In addition, you would like to avoid causing confusion by avoiding abbreviations or shorthand as well. to pull the {id} or {code} elements from the /v2/suppliers collections you want: /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers/{code}. Forsake of simplicity. Maybe null or any would work? (seriously wrong), What I mean is : 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. They are not mine. The way a client uses an OpenAPI API is by following these three steps: Decide which OpenAPI URL path template to use Calculate the parameter values to use (if any) Plug the parameter values into. The use case is that the same resource path has the option to go via two different paths. So sticking to singular names will help you not run out of choices. Account numbers are NPI (sensitive) data so I will never put them in URI/URL. The more important invariant here is for PUT the subordinate resource identifier is *already known* by the client and the request is idempotent (meaning no new resources with new identities can ever be created with a PUT). Someone has to name those URLs. The other one sending multiple message to my service. Bad examples (Typical and Singleton resources): Good examples (Typical and Singleton resources): Do not use underscores. As a developer, you should be familiar with the reason: The forward slashes denote the URI hierarchy. 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 right that URIs should be instructed to clients through hypermedia. First URI: Courses seems to be the collection and year & semester are filters. I explained in the first sentence of the comment. In my opinion, APIs are THE next major advancement interoperability, personal devices/cool-bells-and-whistles notwithstanding. Hey wonjin what about query parameter? All resources could potentially contain an infinite tree structure, so you might as well say all resources should have a trailing slash. 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. You can use versioning and move it all the way to the left so that, in a sense, it has the highest scope. Wich pattern i can use in a model with a composite key? Java ,java,api,google-app-engine,rest,naming-conventions,Java,Api,Google App Engine,Rest,Naming Conventions,Google App EngineJavaGoogleObjectifyRESTful API. Avoid uses of verbs in the resource. I personally prefer to use the filter _fields in query parameter to limit the fields i want to return from the backend. Also, the names represent the contents of a resource or the resources themselves. If you define an URI for a resource an compose an HTML based on that that uri refers to the root so will be wrong. No need to put id in request path, because it will be stored in session in the server. Ensure that you use lowercase letters in your API URLs. Use singular name to denote document resource archetype. Also avoid api versioning in the resource. This is how the User class looks like. (It is just one example). The only differences are where or how to put the versioning. In fact, in your later controller examples, you used singular nouns (cart and playlist) for store as well: http://api.example.com/cart-management/users/{id}/cart/checkout http://api.example.com/song-management/users/{id}/playlist/play. I hope DELETE and PUT are depreciated! But try to avoid the word delimiter when you can do without it. I will leave this to others to share their thoughts. No reason to keep them. There you define the routes individually or by using groups to form a hierarchy, including variables like {id} in your example. A controller resource models a procedural concept. We have the identity of the user from the token, so when designing the endpoint we are considering several options: 1. one unique DTO that has the ids for the client and manager the endpoint would be the same api/cars/ { carName:, ownerId:, assignerId: }, 2. have different endpoints with different DTOs for each one, something like api/manager-management/cars with this DTO { carName:, ownerId:, assignerId: }, api/client-management/cars with this DTO { carName:, ownerId: }. Now that takes a camelCase out of the window. Use consistent resource naming conventions and URI formatting for minimum ambiguity and maximum readability and maintainability. The example u given using the / where it seems to be using path name as argument or they are actually different directories? JSON,. /v2/suppliers/{id} /v2/suppliers/{code}, *. There may be another practical reason to avoid trailing slashes. This guide will help you understand the REST fundamentals of building RESTful web services. A properly named resource makes an API simple to use and intuitive. http://api.example.com/device-management/managed-devices/{device-id}, meaning? https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven. Whatever you choose, be consistent with the choice. I may be incorrect, so please research. Let's dive into API REST architecture! They are unnecessary and add length and complexity to URIs. We should not use URIs to indicate a CRUD function. 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. Or /v2/suppliers/code ? Increase or decrease action is not important here. 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. How to handle GET search if we have complicated search criteria like:- searching on a user where first_name starts with a and age is greater than 17 and sort by last_name and show pages 3-7. Google recommends keeping all the keywords in the URL separated by a hyphen. for previous versions: /document-template/versions -> then have a list of previous document-templates versions on this page? Also, HATEOAS can be added to link to parent resource URI. Very good article, but I have a question. Developer define endpoint in his/her application without trailing slash and the wants to compile a full UIR with and ID to get sub-resources why you force to pass and ID with and / obviously this goes in the endpoint and you dont want to define 2 endpoints one for listing and one for the sub-resource. The first is *the* method of returning a single resource by its primary identifier. 2. REST URI Naming Convention and Examples. It is better to use a parent name for the resource. you need a middleware for protected endpoints to check a users entitlements for each end point. What kind of resource is /v2/suppliers/id in this example? What happens when in your example we go to /playlists/3/songs/7/history? You have a list of all courses available to the students for Fall 2019. Lets say you want to define the end-points for a College. Naming conventions . // 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. Common API documentationcan be extracted and applied to multiple actions, controllers, or all controllers within an assembly. So the URI is not unique. 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]. E.g. Often, you will encounter requirements where you will need a collection of resources sorted, filtered, or limited based on some specific resource attribute. 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? Of course that also imposes some additional limitations like prohibiting numeric and duplicate usernames. Design a RESTful API according to the resources you serve . 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. The URLs map to their respective endpoint handler. We can identify customers collection resource using the URI /customers. When naming your URIs, it is advised to use nouns instead of verbs or adjectives. Also, I will not put /user in the URL until I have a good reason for it. Writes anything that helps or guides. If it is POST then the controller pattern is RPC rather than REST. Lets critical think it through, /v2/suppliers/id/{id} /v2/suppliers/code/{code}. The RFC 3986 specification for URI standards also denotes that URIs are case-sensitive (except for the scheme and host components of the URL). 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. Also, when you are using versioning from the very beginning and document it, it indirectly tells the users that there might be changes in the future. 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? Instead, each stored resource has a URI. What should be resource identifier? Controller resources are like executable functions, with parameters and return values; inputs and outputs. As for the other options it depends on what your intentions are for each as to what type of solution to use. The format I am using is: But there is no page for abc.com/tokens/5678. GET /jobs/{job-type}/status Returns the status of the job. Resources (URIs) Names and Verbs To describe your resources, use concrete names and not action verbs. It would be better IMO to include a status attribute in the cart resource and update that. Learn on the go with our new app. Since URLs are case sensitive, keeping it low-key (lowercased) is always safe and considered a good standard. Thanks for the article! Hi, Great article, but i have a question. They are the consumers. in order to prevent confusion and security issues. Naming conventions. How to define the number of layers, whether the parameter in the path are counted as one layer. Refresh the page, check Medium 's site. Also you havent mentioned which HTTP method should be called for the controller pattern but if it is GET then you are changing state via a method that should be idempotent. JAX-RS. I will suggest to consider a design change and replace / with another character e.g. Not specific region=USA, only that region exists? But this would be better handled by a well-maintained framework, and Slim is the best Ive found on PHP for lightweight RESTful APIs. Hi I want get the data by multiple params (name,age,group), http://www.mywebsite.com/my-project/data/name/age/group, I will suggest to use filters e.g. Its also possible to have only numeric IDs. This is to specify the association between the action and the resource. /roles/admin should not return you users with admin access. 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. They have been used in other references as well. 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. REST API designers should create URIs that convey a REST API's resource model to the potential clients of the API. This should also determine user access not to resources as a whole, but also on a row by row basis. It is supposed to be stateless isnt it. When you compose APIs in a navigating through the hierarchy you add the name of the resource without an initial slash because it will specified that your are defining the root path. I dont know how it is handled in Node.Js/Express, Java, ASP.net or other server side techs. 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. Introduction in any major breaking update can be avoided with the following /v2. REST APIs use a stateless request model. header, to determine how to process the bodys content. They must always redirect with a 302 or 301 or 307 to another endpoint. How do I get the uri to retrieve a product with id 1 priced through pricing A? PUT need not result in actual resource creation. 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. The URI was chosen by a client when the resource initially put it into the store. I was wondering is there a naming convention for secured resources (endpoint protected by login/password ?). Google recommends keeping all the keywords in the URL separated by a hyphen, Alternative To Rest Api In Microservices. What should I name my api if I want to populate some fields? I think it is fair for the store archetype to use singular nouns. 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. firstName), as this looks so weird. 1. 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 . The below example we have to support another response format we have to add another url, for e.g. This article is taken from the book Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3 by Biharck Muniz Arajo. Keep it consistent throughout. So the request will be: /users/email/verification /users/email/reset-password. REST API conventions The IBM UrbanCode Release REST API follows a set of conventions to make interacting with it more consistent. Given the widespread use of it, avoid any unnecessary confusion due to inconsistent capitalization. Let say I have a resource document-template with attributes code, template, validFrom, validTo, e.g. The /internal/users route or endpoint is placed in web.php file, while /api/v1/users is placed in api.php. Basically when you need to perform a special action over a resource that cant be represented you add the action after a colon at the end. : [GET] /document-templates returns: [ {code: doc1, template: This is template of doc1 ${code}, validFrom: 2020-07-10T15:00:00, validTo: 2021-07-10T15:00:00}, {code: doc1, template: This is newer version of template of doc1 ${code}, validFrom: 2021-07-10T15:00:01, validTo: null} ]. role-based resource-based claims-based and more https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authorization/introduction?view=aspnetcore-2.2. Suchen. rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven seems like a fixed resource name to me. e.g. Login by POST-ing your credentials Logoff by DELETE-ing the auth. They might just not be supported by a particular framework, e.g. Normal people might not know why the words in a link are separated by forward slashes. A document resource is a singular concept that is akin to an object instance or database record. Roy Fielding writes: A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). However, it is up to the collection resource to choose to create a new resource or not. Is it RESTful to use URI with query parameters for performing a POST/PATCH to a subset of a collection? Tips if you want to become a WordPress Developer, How we load tested our APIs in Production, Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems: how to enable flexibility. Hi, You say elsewhere that a resource should have a single logical URI. For changing password: If you are admin, it should be: + PUT: /users/{id}/password. This includes the course title, description, number of credits, pre-requisits etc. 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). Think about naming the class file Shoe or Shoes. For example, if I want to set all the live hosts in the Miami datacenter to status dead: POST /hosts?datacenter=miami&status=live { status: dead }. > A POST should always create a new resource where a PUT replaces an existing one. Some fields (e..g hostname, IP address, etc.) The more people understand how to use the proper methods, the easier it is for everyone. One way of modelling it is to allow only one role id, let the consumer call the API multiple times. Video created by for the course "APIs". checkout is a request created using a POST. Alternative 1 use some wildcard notation (*): http://documents/*/document-links?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION The * would need to be escaped and it is hard to find a good word that is intuitive. Video created by Meta for the course "APIs". Query strings help us handle different requests on the same URL. You have to think of an index name for each part of that, which isnt going to happen. First. Thank you for a very interesting article. checkout is a verb and play are verbs and as you point out at the start it is considered bad practice to use verbs in the URI. Imagine that you introduce these special characters into your naming. Coming from a programming background, camelCase is a popular choice for naming joint words. What you might be worried about is access logs where the URLs are logged (so if these are readable by a wider audience than the users of your system who already have access to that information, that might be a problem). Get to know RESTful API development. im not convinced that the internal definition of user resource is same as the external definition. Or should this still follow the POST vs PUT determination? Is it RESTful? POST /orders/{id}/checkout. The problem with your logic is that collections arent the only resource that can act as a directory. What do you thing about =>page 4 Resource Archetype Document /users/0987/settings. Consider using punctuation in your URLs. Yeah, I know. Tech nerd. 2) accountIds in both URIs can be different numbers. Id rather use as an easy to implement solution, GET /documents?type=YOUR-TYPE&version=YOUR-VERSION&fields=links HTTP/1.1 Host: api.example.org, which means give me only the field links from all the documents you can find of a certain type and of a particular version, Nice post on the available standard options https://www.freshblurbs.com/blog/2015/06/25/api-representations-prefer.html, or you could use odata standard query approach, https://www.odata.org/getting-started/basic-tutorial/. If a job name is known, pass it as the job-type. I requested actually some information (meta data) about the given API in the HEAD method. Grades could also be their own collection (maybe you want to get all grades for visualization?). Below are a few tips to get you going when creating the resource URIs for your new API. Use plural name to denote store resource archetype. In the case when you are killing the API endpoint, aggregate them to a retiral page with a 301. Besides, those characters are typically the encoded versions of unsafe characters like space, brackets, etc. POST: api/v1/tickets/message // Single message POST api/v1/tickets/messages // Multiple message. It should be accept 1 to N messages. The uri I was thinking about is the two above. 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. 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. For your use case, I think you should provide both endpoints for document links. 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. Special characters are not welcomed in naming any API endpoint. Example below, Requirement: Give me access control list for specific list of roles. I think, those aforementioned conventions are enough, so as to comply with uniform interface constraint. Well-chosen names for API endpoints can significantly improve an entire project by making it easier for other developers to use your APIs. Always attempt to version your APIs. It is good to prepare your users for any upcoming changes ahead of time. The difference is to access secured resources, it must follow authentication mechanism which is a common practice. You can use JSON object to send data to the API. 10 Best Practices for Naming REST API Endpoints | by Deddy Tandean | Better Programming Write Sign up Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. To simplify the engine (and the lives of your API consumers), pick one to identify the target resource and use the query pattern for all others. Representational state transfer, or REST, is the abbreviation. Discover emerging API technology and practice other ways to build and work with APIs. It will help in the effective grouping of resources. Token one can have many other tokens. Love podcasts or audiobooks? In this case my scope would be groups:clone. Is there a situation where you can use a POST on a document. It is recommended to use query parameters for REST API Filters and Sort. 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. While REST APIs are extremely useful, creating them can be a time-consuming process. Tech nerd. Something along the lines access-management/roles/{ids}/acls. -- Phil Karlton. The URLs that you have typically encountered have the following syntax: Well, you get what I mean. Any suggestions for this? Or please share an example if there is a gap. Instead it will return a document describing the admin role. POST /events I also used this API to trigger an event in the system as part of any API completion or anything else. Having a consistent and robust REST resource naming strategy will prove one of the best design decisions in the long term. For example, using this sites terminology, will there ever be a standard Document for a Person base class, Location base class, etc? 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. If an API is composed of several services they should be named in a way to help discoverability. REST is an architectural style that provides constraints that guide API design. None of the endpoints once published should return 404. Usually you would write one script that catches all the requests. You are talking about the current team, then delete the user from the team. 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. 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