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apirestapi-design

What is the correct way of adding parameter to ignore case for search text in a REST API

I have an API endpoint to retrieve all users. There are 3 query parameters for searching/filtering the results as follows.

GET /users?name=test&age=23&area=abc

Now I want to introduce an option to ignore the case when searching for the name parameter. For example, the above API call should return even if the name equals Test or tesT.

What's the correct way of implementing this option? Adding another query parameter or is there any better way of implementing it?

Solution

  • In this specific case, an easier option could be to define the query parameter value as a regex expression, since regex expression itself allows us to define a string to be case insensitive / sensitive.

    In other scenarios, another option would be to incorporate the specification (that the value needs to be case insensitive) into the query param value itself, like

    http://localhost:3000?name=case_insensitive(test)