CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrest
globetro
globetro

Reputation: 51

Opinions on RESTful route for DELETEing of nested resources?

Given a typical nested resource of a photo with comments, the route to create a comment would look something like:

POST /photos/{photo_id}/comments

Now, for deleting the comment, would you still use a "nested" route? ex:

DELETE /photos/{photo_id}/comments/{comment_id}

or

DELETE /comments/{comment_id}

The pro of the nested route is that it mirrors the creation URL and doesn't require any additional entries in routes.rb. The pro of using a top-level URL is that you technically don't need the photo_id to get the comment to delete.

Thoughts?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 631

Answers (3)

saintedlama
saintedlama

Reputation: 6898

How you model the comments resource depends heavily how you see the resource comments.

In case a comment could exist without a photo and could be associated with 0 to N resources like photo then you should model your comments like this

GET    /comments/{comment_id}
DELETE /comments/{comment_id}

PUT    /comments/

POST   /comments/{comment_id}/associations/photo/{photo_id}

In case a comment is always associated with a resource and cannot exist without being associated with a resource then you should stick with 

POST   /photos/{photo_id}/comments

DELETE /photos/{photo_id}/comments/{comment_id}

I guess the confusion how to model the comment is driven by the database model where every comment gets a unique id that is unique among all comments and not just unique in a photo_id and comment_id combined key. I suggest not to let the database model leak to the resource model and go for a model that fits your conceptional understanding of the resource.

Upvotes: 4

user647772
user647772

Reputation:

Can you GET this?

GET /comments/{comment_id}

I guess not. But if you can't GET a resource, you can't DELETE it, too.

So only your second option is RESTful.

Upvotes: 2

Thanh
Thanh

Reputation: 8604

Personally, I'm just using nested route for delete, means i used:

DELETE /photos/{photo_id}/comments/{comment_id}

to delete comments of a photo. If i use:

DELETE /comments/{comment_id}

so i have to create one more route for this? I don't find any reasons to create a separate route for delete, I think it's not necessary. The nested resources have create url and path for us, and they are follow convention, why don't we use them? I just want to keep it simple and will not do extra work for things already have.

Upvotes: 1

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