RESTful URL design - how to query using OR between parameters

Question

How would you design a RESTful query to support OR operand between parameters. Let's say my resource has two fields field1 & field2. How would you design the URL to enable the following query:

"Get myresources where field1=x OR field2=y"

Designing queries in REST is pretty straight forward, but I have only seen queries that supports AND between query fields. e.g. /myresource?field1=x&field2=y

A possible solution can be to provide a single query parameter with free text where part, for example:

GET /myresource?q={field1=x OR field2=y}

But that would make it more complicated for clients to parse and extend or reduce filtered fields.

What do you suggest?

Answer 1

Query params aren't by definition AND related, they're just inert params - how you handle them is up to you. For an OR search I'd suggest:

GET /myresources?field1=x&field2=y&inclusive=true

If you want to default to an AND relationship (reasonable), and any other extension you want is of course possible.

Answer 2

For what its worth, SO uses the following format for finding questions with multiple tags:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=jquery or css or asp.net or php or web-development or svn

It's perfectly reasonable to separate them with , or ; assuming those aren't valid characters for the tags themselves. Search engines typically use q=keyword1+keyword2 and url-encode any + in the keywords themselves which is what I would suggest you do if this is for a search URI.