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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T09:41:57+00:00

Having trouble coming up with a good URL path for the case in which

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Having trouble coming up with a good URL path for the case in which the same RESTful resource (model) is associated in two or more different ways with another RESTful resource, e.g.:

  • Specify a URL path that intuitively represents a request to look up all instances of training sessions associated with a certain trainer, where the TrainingSession model has a trainer_id that is an association to the Employee model.
  • Specify a URL path that intuitively represents a request to look up all instances of training sessions associated with a certain trainee, where the TrainingSession model has a trainee_id that is also an association to the Employee model.

Including “trainees” or “trainers” in the path of the URL doesn’t seem to be right, since they aren’t real resources (only TrainingSession and Employee are):

  • /trainees/1/training_sessions
  • /trainers/1/training_sessions

But, using “employees” is too ambiguous and could mean either:

  • /employees/1/training_sessions

What would you suggest for these routes/paths and why?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Actually using trainees and trainers is not wrong at all.

    Your trainees and trainers both urls can map to the employee controller function which then find the trainee / trainer data using the id provided. I don’t see why you could not do that. It is simply smart url directing.

    If you had to store information about trainees and trainers seperately then they need their own model. But if TrainingSession has trainee id and trainer id which maps directly to employee ids and you don’t have to store anything else about the trainee and trainer I don’t see why the mentioned approach is not usable.

    EDIT: The following is a matter of philosophy and therefore largely debatable.

    I feel the REST principles is for the API user. So as long as user sees that there is a trainee resource and trainer resource and can manipulate it it is REST. How you implement inside, say using MVC is your choice. A good way would be to use MVC principles but principles are guidelines and no golden rules can be applied to all situations. I think creating virtual resources is just fine and they don’t have to map to models / controllers of their own.

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