CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsrestexpress
Shih-Min Lee
Shih-Min Lee

Reputation: 9700

RESTful route design

I have a collection called Entity and each entity has a property called groups. 

{
  _id: xxx,
  groups: [g1, g2, g3],
  others...
}

An entity have at most a few groups. The groups don't change a lot and I don't store it in separate collections. A group array object look like this:

g1 = {
  group_id: xxx,
  name: xxx
}

Also I have a User collection. Each user belongs to exactly 1 entity and 1 group. So basically we have a property called user.entity and user.group that references to exactly 1 entity document above.

When the user wants to get the entity information he can do GET /entity/123. That's easy. What about entity groups? The possible choices are

GET /entity/123/group or GET /group.

Method 1 is straight forward. You're already telling people you want to get groups in entity 123. So you can setup middlewares to turn 123 into req.entity and return entity.groups directly. But for admins he might want to query all groups in all entities and this API seems not right?

Reason why method 2 is also ok is because after I get req.user I can check req.user.entity, query entity 123 and return the groups. But I feel like I have to do extra condition checks to get the groups. Also if an admin wants to query all groups we will just have to query with a different condition and the query conditions could be messy/

So what is the better design here? Is there one that's more RESTful than the other? (by the way 1 user will have exactly 1 group and 1 entity and user.entity will never change.)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 54

Answers (1)

yoogeeks
yoogeeks

Reputation: 965

I'm working on a similar project and my solution is a mixture of both of your possible choices :

GET /group?entity_id=123

With this, I can directly access groups via entity_id and can return all groups when entity_id is missing (ex. in case of admins).

This method depends whether your groups are nested inside entities, or they are independent (i.e can 2 different entities have 2 different groups with same id?).

If they are independent, you can also do something like :

GET /group/456

to access a group directly via it's id. However, this won't work if you've 2 groups with same ids. In that case, it's better to nest your url via entity/:id/group

Upvotes: 1

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