How to construct a REST API that takes an array of id's for the resources

Question

If you are passing all your parameters on the URL, then probably comma separated values would be the best choice. Then you would have an URL template like the following:

api.com/users?id=id1,id2,id3,id4,id5

 api.com/users?id=id1,id2,id3,id4,id5
 api.com/users?ids[]=id1&ids[]=id2&ids[]=id3&ids[]=id4&ids[]=id5

IMO, above calls does not looks RESTful, however these are quick and efficient workaround (y). But length of the URL is limited by webserver, eg tomcat.

RESTful attempt:

POST http://example.com/api/batchtask

   [
    {
      method : "GET",
      headers : [..],
      url : "/users/id1"
    },
    {
      method : "GET",
      headers : [..],
      url : "/users/id2"
    }
   ]

Server will reply URI of newly created batchtask resource.

201 Created
Location: "http://example.com/api/batchtask/1254"

Now client can fetch batch response or task progress by polling

GET http://example.com/api/batchtask/1254

---

This is how others attempted to solve this issue:

• Google Drive
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Subbu Allamaraju

I find another way of doing the same thing by using @PathParam. Here is the code sample.

@GET
@Path("data/xml/{Ids}")
@Produces("application/xml")
public Object getData(@PathParam("zrssIds") String Ids)
{
  System.out.println("zrssIds = " + Ids);
  //Here you need to use String tokenizer to make the array from the string.
}

Call the service by using following url.

http://localhost:8080/MyServices/resources/cm/data/xml/12,13,56,76

where

http://localhost:8080/[War File Name]/[Servlet Mapping]/[Class Path]/data/xml/12,13,56,76

As much as I prefer this approach:-

    api.com/users?id=id1,id2,id3,id4,id5

The correct way is

    api.com/users?ids[]=id1&ids[]=id2&ids[]=id3&ids[]=id4&ids[]=id5

or

    api.com/users?ids=id1&ids=id2&ids=id3&ids=id4&ids=id5

This is how rack does it. This is how php does it. This is how node does it as well...