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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T17:08:46+00:00

It is said that in a well defined RESTful system, the clients only need

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It is said that in a well defined RESTful system, the clients only need to know the root URI or few well known URIs and the client shall discover all other links through these initial URIs. I do understand the benefits (decoupled clients) from this approach but the downside for me is that the client needs to discover the links each time it tries access something i.e given the following hierarchy of resources:

/collection1
collection1
  |-sub1
    |-sub1sub1
 |-sub1sub1sub1
         |-sub1sub1sub1sub1
    |-sub1sub2
  |-sub2
    |-sub2sub1
    |-sub2sub2
  |-sub3
    |-sub3sub1
    |-sub3sub2

If we follow the “Client only need to know the root URI” approach, then a client shall only be aware of the root URI i.e. /collection1 above and the rest of URIs should be discovered by the clients through hypermedia links. I find this cumbersome because each time a client needs to do a GET, say on sub1sub1sub1sub1, should the client first do a GET on /collection1 and the follow link defined in the returned representation and then do several more GETs on sub resources to reach the desired resource? or is my understanding about connectedness completely wrong?

Best regards,
Suresh

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You will run into this mismatch when you try and build a REST api that does not match the flow of the user agent that is consuming the API.

    Consider when you run a client application, the user is always presented with some initial screen. If you match the content and options on this screen with the root representation then the available links and desired transitions will match nicely. As the user selects options on the screen, you can transition to other representations and the client UI should be updated to reflect the new representation.

    If you try and model your REST API as some kind of linked data repository and your client UI as an independent set of transitions then you will find HATEOAS quite painful.

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