CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rest
Tony Ennis
Tony Ennis

Reputation: 12299

REST versus more complicated data requests

REST APIs work great for get-one, get-a-list etc.

But our frontend has a dashboard, and one part of the dashboard is a more complicated. It requires a query that aggregates/joins several different resources.

Returning the data is not a problem. But what of the taxonomy of the endpoint that returns this data? Since the data is not a resource, what should the URL look like?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 40

Answers (1)

Bartosz Bilicki
Bartosz Bilicki

Reputation: 13255

For REST principles it does not matter much if data returned 'aggregates/joins several different resources'. It is implementation detail of underlying data store. The dashboard should not care how exactly that store is implemented, if it uses joins, multiple queries.

Whatever is displayed on dashboard (single item or list of items) still may be treated as resource.

Example: Imagine use case when dashboard shows aggregated user profile from multiple portals (Facebook, Linkedin, etc). You may still have REST resource /user/id for that, even if obtaining that single resource would require many complex operations.

Upvotes: 3

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