Question

I have a question on creating my url. I have a model like this –

class Conversation(models.Model):
    created_on = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    subject = models.TextField()
    started_by = models.ForeignKey(User,related_name='creator')
    target = models.ForeignKey(User,related_name='receiver')

class UnreadItems(models.Model):
    unread = models.BooleanField()
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    user = models.ForeignKey(User,null=True)
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type','object_id')

I require a view whereby i return all unread conversations of the current logged-in user (i have around 3 classes of users in my application). For my url, I can probably have foo.com/conversation/unread?user_id=234fsg88j or I can have simply use foo.com/conversation/unread/ and use request.user to filter the user’s conversation.

Is the latter a sounder approach and/or what is the disadvantage in using it?

Answer 1

Admittedly, this is a pretty subjective question, But I tend to put data pertaining to a particular User at the front of the url. Since conversations are a resource belonging to the user, that would follow the user. Unread is really a predicate that filters out some of the data, much like a page range, or “starred” items, so that would end up in a query parameter. Finally, I like my parameters to be easy to construct in javascript, so My url for this would look like

/users/tokenmacguy/conversations?unread=true

If the conversations should never be visible except to the user that owns them, then it would go on a resource that is per-user, something like

/my-profile/conversations?unread=true