REST: Should I redirect to the version URL of an entity?

Question

I am currently working on a REST service. This service has an entity which has different versions, similar to Wikipedia articles.

Now I'm wondering what I should return if for

GET /article/4711

Should I use a (temporary) redirect to the current version, e.g.

GET /article/4711/version/7

Or should I return the current version directly? Using redirects would considerably simplify HTTP caching (using Last-Modified) but has the disadvantages a redirect has (extra request, 'harder' to implement). Therefore I'm not sure whether this is good practice though.

Any suggestions, advise, or experiences to share?

(btw: ever tried search for "REST Version"? Everything you get is about the version of the API rather than entities. So please bear with me if this is a duplicate.)

Answer 1

If you treat versions as entities (which by the looks of it you do) this is what I'd suggest:

GET /article/4711

returns a list of all versions (and links to them). Which makes /article/4711 a container entity.

GET /article/4711/latest

returns contents of the latest version. You might want to consider /version/latest to get in-line with the below.

GET /article/4711/version/7

returns the specific version of the article.

Answer 2

Depends on your intended behavior for GET /article/4711. If it is intended to always point to the latest version, then it should return the latest version directly. Redirecting to a particular version seems problematic as you are relying on the user/client library to not visit that particular URL in the future. To translate into HTML terms, a user might bookmark the version/7 URL and be surprised that they are now accessing an older version instead of the up to date version they originally typed into the address bar.