Question

I have come across this issue a few times now, and each time I make a fruitless search to come up with a satisfying answer.

We have a collection resource which returns a representation of the member URIs, as well as a Link header field with the same URIs (and a custom relation type). Often we find that we need specific data from each member in the collection.

• At one extreme, we can have the collection return nothing but the member URIs; the client must then query each URI in turn to determine the required data from each member.

• At the other extreme, we return all of the details we might want on the collection. Neither of these is perfect; the first can result in a large number of API calls, and the second may return a lot of potentially unneeded information.

Of the two extremes I favour the second in our case, since we rarely use this for more than one sutiation. However, for a more general approach, I wondered if anyone had a nice way of dynamically specifying which details should be included for each member of the collection? I guess a query string parameter would be most appropriate, but I don’t want to break the self-descriptiveness of the resource.

Answer 1

Sounds like you’re trying to reinvent PROPFIND (RFC 4918, Section 9.1).