How to pass Account ID to a REST API

Question

My HTTP API requires the frontend to pass an accountId on API calls due to the fact we support admin users who are not tied to a single account and could be querying any account.

Initially I implemented this as a header the issue here is that caching would not work.

The current implementation looks like api.com/endpoint?accountId=123 whilst this works well - I would like to understand if this is the correct approach when implementing a RESTful HTTP API.

UPDATE: Based on a comment - this is for GET

Answer 1

IMO, you did things "the right way" (TM) by putting this information in a HTTP header -- that seems to be the correct place for this to live. However your caching system currently doesn't care about HTTP headers, so that leaves you with a practical problem (which doesn't really care about "the right way"). So...

Based on that, it sounds like you have two options:

1. Fix your caching to include specific headers as part of the cache key, or
2. Add relevant information to the URL for caching purposes

I'd suggest (1) where you update the cache key to be a hash of the URL + other relevant information that would result in a different result (in this case, the HTTP header including the account ID or session information). This allows you to keep putting information in the right place while also not causing issues for cached pages.

Of course this might not be possible, so the only practical solution I can offer you is (2) where you pull stuff into the URL in order to support caching. I think this is an anti-pattern, but it will get the job done.