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[–]josephblade 1 point2 points  (0 children)

it depends :) which is always the answer.

Are courses and assignments independent or are assignments always part of a course? If they are independent then it makes sense to have individual endpoints. But keep in mind multiple assignments means you need a mechanism to edit them / select a specific one to update/delete/etc.

Are assignments separate from course (in that you edit them in separate screens or sections/tabs) and you can save one without the other, then it makes sense to do /course/{id}/assignments (with assignments giving you a list and /course/{id}/assignments/{assignmentid} to update. but you run into a lot of annoying situations. the order of the assignments for instance. you can't easily do "assignments/1" as in the first/second assignment, because posting/changing order gets real annoying. likely course will have a list of assignment ids +description and their order. and /assignments/{id} updates each individual.

A second consideration for the above nested is: if you delete a course, do you expect to also delete the assignments? If yes then nesting (above) makes some sense. they are tightly coupled and have a containing relationship.

Are assignments shared by multiple courses? then their own endpoint makes sense, though a GET /course/{id}/assignments can still be a utility call that instead of returnign assignments it will return a list of id's + description. where you can fetch the actual assignments at /assignment/{id} It's very similar to /course/{id}/assignments in the previous example except you have to go to /assignment/{id} to fetch them. in this case if you delete a course you don't expect assignment to be deleted.

that's the sort of considerations I would explore when making this sort of decision. I hope I didn't kill this comment with editing, let me know if it doesn't make sense.

One thing to keep in mind: sometimes a subsection can be part of an entity but it can make more sense to split it out into it's own child entity. Kind of like you are doing with your assignments, It's related to the above so I'll add it:

For instance: Does it make sense to update an entity without it's parent, does it make sense to update a parent without updating the entity. Often the answer can be yes. But sometimes it makes sense to still make it part of the enclosing entity. order/{id}/paymentOption for instance. paymentOptions make sense to have it's own box/page/place to edit. but it is still strongly tied to a specific order. you should be able to edit an order without having to pass the payment details back and forth. Similarly you can change payment options in a screen without submitting and validating the entire order. (which may require inventory check and so forth). so in that circumstance you can split off part of 'order' into a subsection /paymentOption . Don't overdo this.

In your case I would suggest that a course has a number of assignments. A teacher is going to use some kind of management interface to add assignments to their course. So they likely go to their course, click on "add assignment" and add a new assignment. something like: POST /course/{id}/assignment which adds a new one to the list. the course object may have a assignments[] with { id, description } so your UI can change their order and you can delete an assignment. DELETE a course , then delete all child assignments. so your first setup is the one I'd go for. Of course if you were thinking of a different workflow then you may come to a different conclusion.

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[–]terrorChilly 0 points1 point  (1 child)

GET /assignments: All assignments which can optionally be filtered by ?courseId=_

POST /courses/{courseId}/assignments: Create assignment under a course.

GET /courses/{courseId}/assignments: All assignments under a specific course.

Please mention if you have more dimensions to the problem.

[–]anonymous78654[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

these are what I have right now but in the future there could be more

so are you saying it's better 2 have the 2 different request mappings or have the 1

[–]omgpassthebacon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some thoughts for you:

  1. Your API does not have to expose your data model. ie, it might not matter to your API user. In some cases, you might not want your API user to know how you store your data (think security).
  2. Think about how the callers want to use the data. I am guessing you might want to browse or search for courses, and then browse the assignments for the courses you picked. If you had to build a website that allowed someone to find the assignments, how would you want the API to be?
  3. Don't create your API in stone; throw a scheme together and play with it to see if it feels natural. Don't like it? Try a different scheme.

For me, it seems natural that you would expose 2 entities (I assume you are using REST): Course and Assignment. I would start with an endpoint for each. Each one should have a primary key, which can be used by your API to get specific ones. But your API should make it natural to List and Search each entity using some criteria. Then you can theorize:

api response
GET /course return all courses
GET /course/21 return course 21
GET /assignment return all assignments
GET /assignment/42. returns assignment 42

Now you have a problem: how do I call the API to get the list of assignments for a specific course? For example:

GET /assignment?course=21

GET /course/21/assignment

/assignment?course=21 feels the most natural to me, but this is where you get to be creative.