CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apirest
niklr
niklr

Reputation: 1701

RESTful design: resolving relationships

My questions are based on this article: should-restful-apis-include-relationships

Let's say I have the following resources: users and roles

A single user can be retrieved by api/users/{userId} and a single role by api/roles/{roleId}

The response data of a single user looks like this:

Id: 1
Firstname: Alice
Lastname: Henderson
Email: [email protected]
Roles: api/users/1/roles

To get the roles of this user the application needs to call the returned url api/users/1/roles

For displaying 1 user this approach seems to be ok. But if I want to display all users with their corresponding roles the application needs 1 call to api/users and x calls to api/users/x/roles

How can this design be improved for retrieving multiple users and resolving their role relationships?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 184

Answers (1)

Eric Stein
Eric Stein

Reputation: 13672

You can design your API to accept one or more query parameters which specify the detail level you desire. For instance:

GET /api/users/1?expand=role(self, id, name)

{
    "id": 1
    "firstName": "Alice"
    "lastName": "Henderson"
    "email": "[email protected]"
    "roles": [
        {
            "self": "api/roles/4"
            "id": 4
            "name": "Administrator"
        },
        {
            "self": "api/roles/7"
            "id": 7
            "name": "Uberuser"
        }
    ]
}

Upvotes: 1

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