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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T01:07:05+00:00

I had a discussion with a colleague today around using query strings in REST

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I had a discussion with a colleague today around using query strings in REST URLs. Take these 2 examples:

1. http://localhost/findbyproductcode/4xxheua
2. http://localhost/findbyproductcode?productcode=4xxheua

My stance was the URLs should be designed as in example 1. This is cleaner and what I think is correct within REST. In my eyes you would be completely correct to return a 404 error from example 1 if the product code did not exist whereas with example 2 returning a 404 would be wrong as the page should exist. His stance was it didn’t really matter and that they both do the same thing.

As neither of us were able to find concrete evidence (admittedly my search was not extensive) I would like to know other people’s opinions on this.

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  1. Editorial Team

    In typical REST API’s, example #1 is more correct. Resources are represented as URI and #1 does that more. Returning a 404 when the product code is not found is absolutely the correct behavior. Having said that, I would modify #1 slightly to be a little more expressive like this:

    http://localhost/products/code/4xheaua

    Look at other well-designed REST APIs – for example, look at StackOverflow. You have:

    stackoverflow.com/questions
stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rest
stackoverflow.com/questions/3821663

    These are all different ways of getting at “questions”.

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