Question

I’m building a website where users can sell products. I’m beginning with a RESTful api, so far I have:

/Product (Accepts, post)
/Product/[product_id] (Accepts, get, put, delete)

I also want to list all of the products for all users, so I’m thinking of having:

/Products (Accepts, get)

and here’s my problem, I also want the user to view their own products, so I’m also thinking of having:

/MyProducts (Accepts, get)

I just think that having /Products & /MyProducts are kind of the same, except they are filtered on the user, so what method should I use to do this?

I’ve thought about the below, but don’t know if this is frowned upon:

/Products (Accepts, get) <- returns all products
/Products/[user_id] (Accepts, get) <- returns all products for a user id.

Any help, pointers or guidance extremely welcomed!

Thanks

Chris

Answer 1

Simplify drastically. There are really only two resources you need:

• Something to represent a collection of products, URI: /products
• Something to represent a single product, URI: /products/{id}

All your needs can be met with just those two resources:

• To see every product in the system: GET /products
• To see just your own products: GET /products?showOnlyMine=true
• To create a new product: POST /products which returns a Location of /products/{id}
• To see a single product: GET /products/{id}

Feel free to use a different URI parameter than showOnlyMine, of course.