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restrestful-url

RESTful POSTS, do you POST objects to the singular or plural Uri?

Which one of these URIs would be more 'fit' for receiving POSTs (adding product(s))? Are there any best practices available or is it just personal preference?

/product/ (singular)

or

/products/ (plural)

Currently we use /products/?query=blah for searching and /product/{productId}/ for GETs PUTs & DELETEs of a single product.

Solution

  • Since POST is an "append" operation, it might be more Englishy to POST to /products, as you'd be appending a new product to the existing list of products.

    As long as you've standardized on something within your API, I think that's good enough.

    Since REST APIs should be hypertext-driven, the URI is relatively inconsequential anyway. Clients should be pulling URIs from returned documents and using those in subsequent requests; typically applications and people aren't going to need to guess or visually interpret URIs, since the application will be explicitly instructing clients what resources and URIs are available.