Question

I’m constructing a restful service which needs to accept any number of parameters instead of the one from the sample below.

Assuming the following service routine

@RequestMapping("/start/id/{id}", RequestMethod.GET)
public void startService(@PathVariable String id) {...}

there’s a client implementation based on RestTemplate

restTemplate.getForObject("/start/id/{id}", null, id);

Question: But given that it might be thousands of ids, what restful approaches do I have to sending all parameters in one request using RestTemplate? I’ve seen the suggestions

• Add request body to GET request – Doesn’t seem possible with RestTemplate?
• Use a separator in id, (e.g., id1|id2|....|idn) – Seems like a hack
• PUT the parameters first, then issue a GET to reference the ids – Double requests, seems non-intuitive
• Adding multiple URL parameters (?id=foo&id=bar&.....&id=foobar)

---

I know similar questions (calling-a-restful-service-with-many-parameters, how-to-create-rest-urls-without-verbs, can-you-build-a-truly-restful-service-that-takes-many-parameters) has been asked before but I found it hard to spot a satisfactory answer, or at least an answer based on RestTemplate.

Answer 1

You could use a query parameter for all the ids:

/search?ids=1,2,3,4,5,6,7

Then tokenize by the comma and do your search. Remember that you will be capped by the maximum URL length if you issue this as a GET query string parameter.