Twitter is great for one-liners, but it’s very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I’d be picking a different medium to reply:
@lornajane sory for getting on your nervs with #rest,but are subquerys (like couchDB does) restfull to? is there a rule? like …/?type=bla
— Maximilian ‘Berghoff (@ElectricMaxxx) June 12, 2013
The blog seems like a good place, as I can put examples and all kinds other things here, and waffle at length (which is really why I like it!). Because when condensed to tweet form, the answer is really “it depends”.
The Problem(s)
REST is all about representations of resources. They might come in different formats, and they might appear at their own URI as well as in one or more collections, but essentially you just get a representation of a thing. This is great, apart from when it isn’t.
- What if you want a smaller result set with only a limited number of fields?
- What if you want related data? For every resource in a collection?