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I am a backend developer and I am writing a restful application. I have a question about how best to design the endpoints.

I have a database table that stores values (I just provided an example)

|id (int)|A (bool)| B (bool)|
| 1      |   0    |    0    |
| 2      |   0    |    1    |
| 3      |   1    |    1    |

Business logic:

  1. If A=0 B=0 then we consider "no action"
  2. If A=0 B=1 then we consider that "the action has begun"
  3. If A=1 B=1 then we consider "action ended"

How can I do it better?

Style 1

Make one endpoint [PUT] /action to the body of which I will expect from the frontender

{"id": int, "A": bool, "B": bool}

In this case, I'm shifting to the front-end the writing of the logic for separating the use cases of the endpoint

Style 2

Make a separate endpoint for each business function

  1. [POST] /action/begin
  2. [POST] /action/end
  3. [DELETE] /action

In this case I expect only the id of the object from the front, and I will fill in A and B myself

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  • 1
    Your database table (and it's corresponding JSON) are implementation details. There is some benefit to hiding those details via Style 2.
    – Robert Harvey
    Aug 31, 2022 at 14:29
  • But there is no "best" way. There is only that way that best meets your specific needs.
    – Robert Harvey
    Aug 31, 2022 at 14:29
  • 2
    The semantics of your application should be reflected in the api, but with this foo bar example there are no semantics to inform the style
    – Ewan
    Aug 31, 2022 at 14:32
  • It's hard to opine without knowing the specifics but it seems to me that Style 2 is almost intuitively obvious while Style 1 is completely obscure and would require documentation to understand. So my instinct is to prefer Style 2. Style 2 also lets you use HTTP nodes (e.g. firewall, proxy) to filter, restrict, or route requests by path or verb. With Style 1 it would not be very natural to do the same.
    – John Wu
    Sep 2, 2022 at 16:36

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