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api-design

Should my JSON reponse contain the request query parameter's value?

Should I include the input query parameter in the response?

Let's say that I have an endpoint which returns people's names. I am allowing my client to filter the result by country.

I wonder, should I include the country property in the response or not, even though it matches what the client requested.

For example when the user sends the below request

/people?country=UK

should I return 

[{"name":"tom"},{"name"="tim"}]

or

[{"name":"tom","country":"UK"},{"name":"tim","country":"UK"}]

as the response?

Solution

  • Depends on what data the client needs.

    If you just want a way to tell the client what they requested, you could have some convention in your API that there's a top-level node that shows what the parameters in the request were that generated this reponse.

    {"requestParams":"country=UK&city=London", data: [{"name":"tom", "street":"Wallaby"}, {"name":"tim", "street":"West"}]

    But you definitely don't want to risk returning sensitive information by returning the request params.