Question

As a follow up to my previous question about REST URIs for retrieving statistical information for a web forum Resource, I want to know if it is possible to use the internal anchors as filter hints. See example below:

a) Get all statistics:

GET /group/5t7yu8i9io0op/stat
{ 
    group_id: "5t7yu8i9io0op",
    top_ranking_users: {
      [ { user: "george", posts: 789, rank: 1 }, 
        { user: "joel", posts: 560, rank: 2 }  ...]
      },
    popular_topics: {
      [ ... ]
    },
    new_topics: {
      [ ... ]
    }
}

b) GET only popular topics

GET /group/5t7yu8i9io0op/stat#popular_topics
{ 
    group_id: "5t7yu8i9io0op",
    popular_topics: {
      [ ... ]
    }
}

c) GET only top ranking users

GET /group/5t7yu8i9io0op/stat#top_ranking_users
{ 
    group_id: "5t7yu8i9io0op",
    top_ranking_users: {
      [ { user: "george", posts: 789, rank: 1 }, 
        { user: "joel", posts: 560, rank: 2 }  ...]
    }
}

Or should I be using query parameters ?

Answer 1

Not sure what you are trying to do exactly, but make sure you understand that fragment identifiers are not seen by the server, they are chopped off by the client connector.

See: http://www.nordsc.com/blog/?p=17