CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsonrestwebservice
xheyhenry
xheyhenry

Reputation: 1069

Structuring json data in GET call query parameters

I'm trying to pass a list of the following objects as query params to a GET call to my Java service:

{
    "id": "123456",
    "country": "US",
    "locale": "en_us"
}

As a url, this would like like 

GET endpoint.com/entity?id1=123456&country1=US&locale1=en_us&id2=...

What's the best way to handle this as a service? If I'm passing potentially 15 of these objects, is there a concise way to take in these parameters and convert them to Java objects on the server side?

I imagine with a URL like this, the service controller would have a lot of @QueryParams...

Upvotes: 0

Views: 344

Answers (2)

codebrane
codebrane

Reputation: 4650

Create the entire dataset as JSON array, e.g.

[
  {
    "id": "123456",
    "country": "US",
    "locale": "en_us"
  },
  {
    "id": "7890",
    "country": "UK",
    "locale": "en_gb"
 }
]

base64 encode it and pass it as a parameter, e.g.

GET endpoint.com/entity?set=BASE64_ENCODED_DATASET

then decode on the server and parse the JSON array into Java objects using perhaps Spring Boot.

Based on the valid URL size comment (although 2000 is usable), you could put the data in a header instead, which can be from 8-16kb depending on the server. GETting multiple resources at once is going to involve compromise somewhere in the design.

As Base64 can contain +/= you can url encode it too although I haven't found the need to do this in practice when using this technique in SAML.

Another approach would be to compromise on searching via country and locale specific IDs:

GET endpoint.com/entity/{country}/{locale}/{id_csv}

so you would search like this:

GET endpoint.com/entity/US/en_us/123456,0349,23421

your backend handles (if using Spring) as @PathParam for {country} and {locale} and it splits {id_csv} to get the list of IDs for that country/locale combination.

To get another country/locale search:

GET endpoint.com/entity/UK/en_gb/7890,234,123232

URLs are much smaller but you can't query the entire dataset in one go as you need to query based on country/locale each time.

Upvotes: 2

saille
saille

Reputation: 9191

It looks like your GET is getting multiple resources from the server. I'd consider refactoring to GET 1 resource from the server per GET request. If this causes performance issues, consider using HTTP caching.

Upvotes: 0

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