I have the following endpoint that returns a page of one entity
/entity?page={page}
However, I need another endpoint that returns a list containing the title of all entities. I need that because there is a dropdown filter option that a user can filter items by title and because of that I have to list all titles there.
I would like to know what would be the best practices to organize this in my API. Maybe just something like:
/entity/titles
From a basic REST perspective, I'd start by restructuring I'd restructure to follow a more standardized structure. In general REST mentality, resources should be named with a plural unless there is only one of them in the scope of the request. Based on that, I'd propose these endpoints
GET /entities/ -> Provides a list of all entities (index action)
GET /entities/:id -> where :id is a URL parameter indicating the ID of the page, Provides the details for a single entity (show action)
With this basic structure, your question becomes more straightforward. If the payload for entity is small and you're not worried about performance, I'd have the front-end request GET /entities and extract out the titles.
If the payload for entity is large, then I'd suggest adding an optional query parameter to the index action:
GET /entities?onlyTitles=true
When this parameter is true, the payload returned can be scoped to just the titles. When omitted or false, the payload returned can be the full payload for entities.