I have a collection of IDs of RESTful resources (all the same type of resource), the number of which can be indefinitely large. I want to make a REST call to get the names of these resources. Something like this:
Send:
['005fc983-fe41-43b5-8555-d9a2310719cd', '4c6e6898-e519-4bac-b03e-e8873d3fa3f0',...] Receive:
['Resource A', 'Resource B',...] What is the best way to retrieve the names of these resources RESTfully?
Here are the ideas I have had and the problems I see with each approach:
- The naive approach is to iterate through all IDs in my collection and do a 'GET /resource/:id' for each ID. This would be prohibitively slow and resource intensive because of the large number of HTTP calls I would have to make.
- The next approach I thought of is to pass the IDs as parameters to a single GET call. The problem here is that most servers have a limit on the URL length, which would be quickly exceeded.
- Next, I thought that putting the IDs in the body of a GET would work, but according to Roy Fielding, data in the GET body should not affect the results of a REST call: HTTP GET with request body
- I could use a POST request and put the data on the POST body, but POST is intended for creating and modifying resources, which is not what I'm doing. Maybe I should ignore the intent of the verb and use it anyway?
- I could split the request into multiple GET requests to avoid exceeding the max URL length. The problem here is that I have to combine the results after all calls have returned, which is potentially slow.
- I could create a collection resource within my main resource by posting my list of IDs to 'POST /resource/collection', then use a 'GET /resource/collection/:id' call to retrieve the results. This actually works, but then I have to do a 'DELETE /resource/collection/:id' to clean up. It takes multiple calls, requires cleanup, and seems a bit clunky overall, so it's okay, but not ideal.
Is there a better way to do this?
