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restrestful-url

How to create REST URLs without verbs?

I'm struggling to determine how to design restful URLs. I'm all for the restful approach of using URLs with nouns and not verbs don't understand how to do this.

We are creating a service to implement a financial calculator. The calculator takes a bunch of parameters that we will upload via a CSV file. The use cases would involve:

  1. Upload new parameters
  2. Get the latest parameters
  3. Get parameters for a given business date
  4. Make a set of parameters active
  5. Validate a set of parameters

I gather the restful approach would be to have the following type URLs:

/parameters
/parameters/12-23-2009

You could achieve the first three use cases with:

  1. POST where you include the parameter file in the post request
  2. GET of first URL
  3. GET of second URL

But how do you do the 4th and 5th use case without a verb? Wouldn't you need URLs like:

/parameters/ID/activate
/parameters/ID/validate

??

Solution

  • Perhaps something like:

    PUT /parameters/activation HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json; encoding=UTF-8
Content-Length: 18

{ "active": true }