Question

I’m new to REST but I’ve built a simple web service and I’m having trouble finding a simple explaination of what URL format would be correct.

The service allows to create an invoice and push it through a series of simple approval phases.

(1) Read all invoices in an XML format:

GET: http://localhost/webapp/ws/invoices

(2) Read one invoice in an XML format (ex. invoice id = 555):

GET: http://localhost/webapp/ws/invoices/555

(3) Submit a new invoice:

POST: http://localhost/webapp/ws/invoices

With the invoice attributes (“userid”, “totalprice”, etc) are included like the POST parameters of a simple HTML form.

(4) Approve an invoice:

POST: http://localhost/webapp/ws/invoices/action

With the action attributes (ex. “userid=123”, invoiceid=567, “action=APPROVE” or “REJECT”, etc) are included like the POST parameters of a simple HTML form.

It works fine, but is that even close to what a RESTful web service is supposed to look like?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks.

Rob

Answer 1

IMHO for the approval process I would do:

(4) Approve an invoice:

PUT: http://localhost/webapp/ws/invoices/555

As you are going to modify an existing resource, identified by the ID (555), so you only need to pass the attributes that will change.