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I have two types of resources: Query and User.

I am POSTing to /queries to create a new query. and POSTing to /users to create a new user.

Which path should I post to , to create a new Query collection and a new User collection ?

As per my understanding, we POST to a resource/collection parent , to create that resource/collection. In this case, the parent for Users and Queries would be the same, if I POST to the parent, how do I identify which collection should be created?

Can I use a factory path to generate these collections, if yes, how?

TL;DR - I use /queries and /users to create a Query and User resource respectively, what path should i use to create the Queries and Users collection?

EDIT: I am looking for advice on how this is usually achieved in REST.

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    You have multiple query collections, each of which has zero or more queries?
    – Eric Stein
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 14:12
  • no, i have a single Query collection and a single User collection
    – gaurav5430
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 14:30
  • the admin can send a list of queries to create the whole query collection. the admin can send a single resource to create a single query.
    – gaurav5430
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 14:52
  • For simplicity, both endpoints could accept an array as request body. The users may send a full array of entities and the Admins just an array of 1 element.
    – Laiv
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 19:50
  • @Laiv they can accept an array, i am just looking for the appropriate way in REST to do this. Also, in this case, it looks like a hack to check the array length equal to 1, everytime i need to overwrite the query collection.
    – gaurav5430
    Commented Apr 27, 2017 at 8:38

1 Answer 1

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I am not sure what you try to achieve. You said that you still have just one collection under /queries and /users. What should be the result of sending new collection?

  1. New collection overwrites currently existing collection

    In this case new collection effectively substitutes an existing one. In that case I would say that PUT request to /queries and /users with new collection as a payload is the way to go.

  2. Elements from new collection are appended to existing entries

    In that case you can provide new endpoint for that, e.g. POST /queries/bulk with collection of queries to append.

If your concern is that underlying collection might not exist when POSTing new (single) element – that should not bother API user at all. GET /queries should be considered a list (maybe empty one), whether or not something physically exists there. Similarily, POST /queries should always work, and it's API implementation job to create underlying physical collection if one doesn't exist.

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  • thanks for a fairly good explanation. I am trying to follow the guidelines from here restapitutorial.com/lessons/httpmethods.html. It says, POST request to parent when you want to create a resource. The whole queries collection is a resource in itself, so it wasn't clear to me if I should POST to the /queries endpoint to create Queries. my requirement is to create a new collection, similar to 1, but no previous collection exists.
    – gaurav5430
    Commented Apr 27, 2017 at 12:40
  • But a collection is not a resource per se. I don't know if I understand correctly, but I think that you are thinking of a collection here like e.g. List in Java, where one needs to create new instance of the list to put elements in it. That's a total mix of concepts. For API user, the collection of queries under /queries always exists, but can be empty.
    – Archie
    Commented Apr 27, 2017 at 13:01
  • “The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. "today's weather in Los Angeles"), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author's hypertext reference must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time.” - Roy Fielding
    – Laiv
    Commented Apr 27, 2017 at 18:16

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