I have a route on my server /registered_contacts, which takes as params a long array of ids, lookups up which of those ids are registered in the database, and returns that subset.
Which HTTP method should this be?
It’s currently a GET request since I figured it’s GET’ing something, but then I’m also a bit uneasy with the long array of ids, which ends up making a request to an endpoint like:
www.server.com/registered_contacts?ids[2]=bob&ids[54]=jon&ids[23]=jack...etc. etc.
One could argue that I’m not actually getting a remote “thing” like /registered/contacts/42, one could also argue that it is a resource which I am neither updating, deleting, or creating… so that leaves getting?
(One worry I also have there is the header getting larger than a packet size, not sure if that becomes an issue)
No, GET is the right method. You’re essentially generating a search result based on a long list of criteria. Your method is (semantically speaking) idempotent, which why it’s not a good fit for a POST.