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Possible Duplicate:
Rails 3 Custom Route that takes multiple ids as a parameter

From what I understand, a good REST URL for getting a resource would look like this:

/resource/{id}

The problem I have is, that I often need to get a large number of resources at the same time and do not want to make a separate HTTP call for each one of them.

Is there a neat URL design that would cater for that or is this just not suitable for a REST API?

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    -1. REST has nothing to do with URL naming conventions. A "good REST URL" is nonsense and suggests that you misunderstand REST architecture. Commented Jul 22, 2009 at 19:57
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    Not a dupe. This is about designing URL naming conventions. Other is about how to implement one in Rails. Commented Aug 6, 2012 at 5:05
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    @aehlke Though the REST architecture as presented by Fielding does not talk about URL naming conventions, I do not think that "good REST URL" is nonsense. It definitely makes sense to design URLs that are clean and convey the intent. Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 9:38
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    @Suhas you're right, and I was too harsh, but the question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about REST. Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 18:02
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    @aehlke Even if it does reveal a misunderstanding of REST, that makes it a good opportunity to post an answer that explains why REST is agnostic to identifier syntax, which is valuable to the asker and to anyone who finds this page. Far from a reason to reprimand someone for asking it. Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 3:29

4 Answers 4

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Based on your response, the answer to your question is to create a new resource that contains that single set of information. e.g.

GET /Customer/1212/RecentPurchases

Creating composite urls that have many identifiers in a single url limits the benefits of caches and adds unnecessary complexity to the server and client. When you load a web page that has a bunch of graphics, you don't see

GET /MyPage/image1.jpg;image2.jpg;image3.jpg

It just isn't worth the hassle.

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3 Comments

This is the way to go. You could use the query string along with a collection, but in this case it would be better to specify some meta-data than a list of ids for example: /Customer/1212/Purchases?limit=30&order=date_desc
This seems to be the way to go.... However, it kind of raises the same question in a different form. What happens when I get all the product ids for the recent purchases back and need to get more information about them (name, picture) from somewhere else that only knows about products? How do I design the api for that?
You give a link to that resource, not an id. So in your RecentPurchases resource, you return <purchase href="/Purchases/21"> And you let the client follow the links
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I'd say /resources/foo,bar,baz (separator may vary depending on IDs' nature and your aesthetic preferences, "foo+bar+baz", "foo:bar:baz", etc.). Looks a bit "semantically" neater than foo/bar/baz ("baz of bar of foo"?)

If resource IDs are numeric, maybe, even with a range shortcut like /resources/1,3,5-9,12

Or, if you need to query not exactly on resources with specifical IDs, but on group of resources having specific properties, maybe something like /resources/state=complete/size>1GiB/!active/...

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feels very unrestful to me, to do it this way. At the very least define a new resource name scope, eg "range" that supports this.
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I ahve used in the past something like this.

/resources/a/d/

and that would return between x and Y a list.

something like

<resources> <resource>a</resource> <resource>b</resource> <resource>c</resource> <resource>d</resource> </resources>

you could also put more advanced searches into the URL dpending on what resource actuall is.

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How would this approach work if it's not a range but random items?
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maybe you could try with

[GET]/purchases/user:123;limit:30;sort_date:DESC

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