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POarchitectural design for REST API with views across resources
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copied!<p>Looking for some input on a REST API architectural design. I often find that the desired data is the combination of a view across multiple resources. Would you expect the client to combine them, or provide an API that does the combination for the client?</p> <p>For example, let's say we are writing a REST API for people to become notified about events. Someone will indicate interest in an event in one of 2 ways:</p> <ul> <li>Join an organization that regularly puts on events that the person has interest in</li> <li>Search for and then mark a particular event run by an organization I wouldn't normally subscribe to</li> </ul> <p>I can retrieve all of the events for user <code>100</code> by doing the following long steps:</p> <ol> <li><code>GET /user/100/organizations</code> returns <code>123</code></li> <li><code>GET /organizations/123/events</code> returns <code>[15,16,20]</code></li> <li><code>GET /user/100/savedevents</code> returns <code>[35,36]</code></li> <li><code>GET /events/15,16,20,35,36</code> returns all of the events</li> </ol> <p>But that seems rather heavy for a client. I almost want a client to be able to say, "give me all of the interesting events for this user":</p> <pre><code>GET /user/100/events </code></pre> <p>...and then require the server to understand that it has to go through all of steps 1-4 and return them, or, at the very least, return <code>[15,16,20,35,36]</code> so it becomes 2 steps: get event IDs; get event details.</p> <p>Does this even make sense, to make a view that cuts across multiple resources that way?</p> <p>EDIT: To explain further. My hesitation is because I can see how <code>/organizations/123/events</code> is a clean resource; if is identical to saying <code>/events?organizations=123</code>, i.e. "give me resource events where organizations=123". Same for <code>/user/100/organizations</code>. </p> <p>But <code>/user/100/events</code> is <strong>not</strong> "give me resource events where organizations=123". It is "give me organizations registrations where user=100, retrieve those organization ids, then give me the events where the organization=123, then give me savedevents where user=100."</p> <p>Each of the three steps itself is a clean resource mapping. Putting them together seems messy. But so does asking a client (especially a Web client), to figure out all that logic!</p>

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