CODEWITHSUNDEEP
restasp.net-web-api
Zathos
Zathos

Reputation: 43

How to pass a large number of input parameters to RESTful service?

I have a RESTful service that returns detailed data about a machine by the supplied list of Ids. GET api/machine/

http://service.com/api/machine/1,2,3,4

Up till now this has been fine since I am getting a small number of machines at a time, but now I need to get all machines (more then 1000). This exceeds the 2000 character limit on URLs.

I have gotten both of the options below to work and I'm looking for some community feedback on which way to go.

Option 1: Split up my GET. Make multiple calls with a subset of the ids. Pros: I am doing a get so using the HTTP verb GET makes sense. Cons: If a person new to the service doesn't know about this limit, or doesn't use my client, it would cause problems.

Option 2: Add a PUT/POST method and include the full list of ids in the body. Pros: Makes 1 call to get all data. Cons: I am now doing a get from a PUT/POST.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2807

Answers (2)

Flavio Silverio
Flavio Silverio

Reputation: 1034

Probably your best course-of-action would be something in the lines of option 2, you can create a JSON on your side with an array of the numbers you want to send in the Body of the message. If there's the possibility of it still being far too large, you can split it in several messages, when you receive the response of one you'd send the next item in the queue, and so on.

Upvotes: 2

laurent
laurent

Reputation: 90756

Another option, used by the Facebook API among others, is to create a "/batch" POST method which can be used to make multiple requests in one go.

So instead of having http://service.com/api/machine/1,2,3,4,5,.... you'll have a batch of requests with /machine/1, /machine/2, /machine/3, etc.

The advantage is that you keep clean RESTful URLs (no more coma-separated values) and it scales very well since you can batch as many requests as you want.

The disadvantage is that it is slightly more complex to build.

See there for more information - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/making-multiple-requests

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions