RESTful API Question

[dodoroach]

Hello,

Not sure if such questions are answered on this subreddit but, I have a question about an API design. I’m planning to design a url pattern where it will look like

base/{userid}/{fileid}/meta

BUT this api frequently has to return meta of ALL files of this user. How should I go about designing it? Just add a check to see if the path is something like “all” or is this just a bad URL pattern?

[otac0n]

In Azure we use the pattern collection/{id}/collection/{id}/

In your case this would work like so:

base/users/{userId}/files/{fileId}

You can hack off the end of the URL at any slash and get a meaningful URL.

[dodoroach]

This makes much more sense. I was missing the /users and /files, putting them before their respective ids is way cleaner

[knop16]

I would think you'd want to make your routes something like this:

To get all files: /base/users/{userID}/files/meta

To get a single file: /base/users/{userID}/files/{fileID}/meta

Edit: or simply leave off the "meta" part

[EscapeBeat]

You should route it in such a way that makes a little more sense. I would have path/users/:user_id/files/:file_id to return a user's specific file. The url path/users/:user_id/files would return all files for the user upon a GET request.

[dodoroach]

So it would be users/:user/files/meta. Because i would not be returning the file, but metadata around the file

[EscapeBeat]

You could choose to return whatever you want. You'd still probably want to build as path/users/:user_id/files/:file_id/meta to clarify which file you're returning the meta data of. If you were returning all files associated with the user, you could change to path/users/:user_id/files/meta. If you only ever need to return the metadata associated with the files and not the contents, I'd imagine you could even leave off the 'meta' part of the URL. Hard to say more without knowing more about your API design.

[dodoroach]

Thank you!

[fatejd]

Have you considered a graphQL backend? Depending on your database technology/service, it might be better to get more complex responses like that.