How to update the order of multiple items via REST API?

Question

I'm working on a REST API for a list of navigation menu items, pretty much for learning purposes. Until this point everything in the API was pretty straightforward because I only had to modify single items via the classic /collection/{id} stuff.

But now I want to change the order of the list items stored in the order field of my database and of course I don't want to do one request for each menu item.

So what would be an appropriate way / a common best practice of doing this?

I could imagine sending a PUT request to /collection with the id-order key-value pairs in the sent data but Laravel (which I use to build the API) does not allow this. I certainly could play around that restriction but I guess there are sensible reasons that this is not allowed.

Another idea would be to send a PUT request to /collection/{ids} with a comma-separated list of IDs but for that I also would have to send a key-value list of the IDs and their order value which seems pretty redundant and due to that also a little dirty.

So what would actually be the best approach?

Answer 1

I suggest that you define a new route with a resource path: /collection/reorder.

This allows to send it using the method POST the list of elements with their new positions. The content will look like something like that:

{
    "element1": 4,
    "element2": 1,
    (...)
}

"element1" is the identifier of an element and the corresponding value, its new order.

You can notice that the format of data you need to send to this method can be depend on the tool you use in the UI to reorder the list (for example, for drag'n drop).

Hope it helps. Thierry