Question

I’m trying to develop a online shopping web service with RESTful. However, I’m so new about this that I don’t know how to design it.

Here is my model:

• User: includes name, email, phone number …etc
• Product:includes its name, its tags and what category it belongs to. (I designed two types of Category: MainCategory and SubCategory, where SubCategory belongs to MainCategory).

Now I have the following needs about Product:

1. List all products under MainCategory M
2. List all products under MainCategory M and SubCategory S
3. List all products belongs to a user A
4. CRUD with the product with product_id

Here is my question about the situation above:

1. List all products under MainCategory M
   • should I use /products/M or /MainCategory/M to list all the products?
2. List all products under MainCategory M and SubCategory S
   • should I use /products/M/S or other ways?
3. List all products belongs to a user A
   • should I use /user/A/products or /products/?user=A or other ways?
4. CRUD with the product with pid(product_id)
   • is this correct? /product/pid

Besides, what to do if I need to sort or add some restriction?
For example:

• List all products under MainCategory M, order by time
  • is this /products/M?order=time_asc ?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

First of all, you’ve got your principal resources:

/users/{id}
/products/{id}

Relationships between these two should be by links, as it makes total sense to think about either without reference to the other (users aren’t owned by products, or vice versa). Use normal CRUD techniques for dealing with these resources, and consider sub-resources for complex attributes.

Then you’ve got the categorization system. This is also nicely modeled as a resource:

/category/{name}
/category/{name}/{subname}

A key difference here is that you don’t need to support any operation other than GET on categories; the information there (a list of the members of the category) is really synthesized from the definitive information on the products. Where you wish to allow people to restrict the set of information returned by the listing (e.g., a limited range, a different ordering) that is done through parameters on the GET. The list of category members should really be a list of links to the relevant product resources.

If you support user categorization, put that as a separate resource and take care to add appropriate security restrictions; only authorized people should be able to see that sort of thing.