Comment by Traubenfuchs
3 days ago
REST(ful) API issues can all be resolved with one addition:
Adding actions to it!
POST api/registration / api/signup? All of this sucks. Posting or putting on api/user? Also doesn‘t feel right.
POST to api/user:signup
Boom! Full REST for entities + actions with custom requests and responses for actions!
How do I make a restful filter call? GET request params are not enough…
You POST to api/user:search, boom!
(I prefer to use the description RESTful API, instead of REST API -everyone fails to implement pure REST anyways, and it‘s unnecessarily limited.)
What is the problem with posting to /user/signup that posting to /user:signup solves?
The system won't be able remember why the user was created unless the content of the post includes data saying it was a signup. That's important for any type of reporting like telemetry and billing.
So then one gets to bike-shed if "signup" it is in the request path, query parameters, or the body. Or that since the user resource doesn't exist yet perhaps one can't call a method on it, so it really should be /users:signup (on the users collection, like /users:add).
Provided one isn't opposed to adopting what was bike-shedded elsewhere, there is a fairly well specified way of doing something RESTful, here is a link to its custom methods page: https://google.aip.dev/136. Its approach would be to add information about signup in a request to the post to /users: https://google.aip.dev/133. More or less it describes a way to be RESTful with HTTP/1.1+JSON or gRPC.
> So then one gets to bike-shed if "signup" it is in the request path, query parameters, or the body.
But that's not a difference between /user/signup and /user:signup .
1 reply →
You might not want a dedicated „Signup“ entity in your model and db.
you would POST to /users
what's the confusion? you're creating a new user entity in the users collection.
...so? Don't have one.