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REST question

6 points by stevepotter ↗ HN
I'll start by saying that I understand REST APIs. However, I am having trouble with one thing. How do typical methods - suspend, archive, export, etc - translate best to REST APIs?

For example, say I have a project management system. And you can archive a project. How should my REST API handle archival?

I assume you'd do a POST to myapp.com/project/1234, and you'd pass some data in like { archived: true }.

Or maybe a POST to: myapp.com/project/1234/archive. Although I guess that URL is not restful.

So what's the approach that most apps take here? A generate "update" action that takes varying parameters, rather than individual actions for each method, would be a bit of a pain to code and document, no?

6 comments

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rmk
Not necessarily, if you are using rails, you get update actions for free in your controller.

So you could do: curl -X PUT -d "<params>" http://myapp.com/project/1234

See section 11.6 (How to take snapshots of resources) in the book "RESTFul web services cookbook" for a discussion of this...

stevepotter
I realize you get update actions. But what if you have different types of updates? Perhaps editing basic info like a project's Title. Or locking it? Or archiving? Are they lumped into the same action?
rmk
No, you can actually generate different names for the actions that are part of url using rails routing, and you can require that they all use the HTTP PUT method.
spooneybarger
you might get more and potentially better answers somewhere like stackoverflow.com
steveklabnik
PUT to myapp.com/project/1234 with the param {"status":"archived"}, then set your model up so that when the status changes to archived, it archives itself.
jsarch
From what I can tell, I think it depends on if you want to be able to access the project later. If you don't, then I would recommend using DELETE /project/1234 with { archived: true} as an option. If you want to view the project later, then I think you should do a PUT to create the "archive" resource as in PUT /project/1234/archive or do a POST if you don't know the actual archive URI.