Is using magic (me/self) resource identifiers going against REST principles?

Question

I've seen URIs that support magic ids for the authenticated user like below:

GET /user/me - list my profile GET /user/me/photos - list my photos 

where the ones below use the actual user id

GET /user/742924 GET /user/742924/photos 

The problem I see is that the same resource id points to a different resource depending on the authenticated user.

Is this going against any REST principles?

Answer 1

Using /me to name a resource that corresponds to the authenticated user is perfectly fine from a REST perspective. According to Roy Thomas Fielding's dissertation, any information that can be named can be a resource:

5.2.1.1 Resources and Resource Identifiers

The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. "today's weather in Los Angeles"), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author's hypertext reference must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time. [...]

When using /me, you have a locator for the authenticated user and it will always identify the concept of an authenticated user, regardless of which user is authenticated.