CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apirest
cubabit
cubabit

Reputation: 2700

How should I link related data in a REST API?

I am designing a RESTful API to represent orders and payment transactions. My (simplified) model looks like this:

---------     ---------------
| order |----<| transaction |
---------     ---------------

i.e. an order can have many transactions. If I have these endpoints to GET the resources:

/orders/{id}
/orders/{id}/transactions

Where the second call returns a list of transaction objects (expanded or just ids that can be accessed via:)

/transactions/{id}

Then how should I update the order resource to describe its transactions?

Should I POST a list of transaction object data to /orders/{id}/transactions and they will be created and linked to the order resource?

Or should I POST to /transactions each transaction and then PUT (or POST?) to /orders/{id}/transactions a list of transaction IDs?

...or something else?

What if I already have a transaction resource and want to link it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 234

Answers (1)

cassiomolin
cassiomolin

Reputation: 130887

You could use POST to create a transaction for an order, as following:

POST /orders/{id}/transactions HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Content-Type: application/json

{
  ... transaction representation ... 
}

To link an existing transaction to an order you could consider the transaction resource contains a sub-resource called order. To replace the order of a transaction, you would use PUT, sending the order identifier in the request payload:

PUT /transactions/{id}/order HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "order": 100 
}

Alternatively, you could use PATCH and JSON Patch to partially update the transaction resource:

PATCH /transactions/{id} HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Content-Type: application/json-patch+json

[
  { "op": "replace", "path": "/order", "value": 100 }
]

Upvotes: 3

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