400 Bad Request would now seem to be the best HTTP/1.1 status code for your use case. At the time of your question (and my original answer), RFC 7231 was not a thing; at which point I objected to 400 Bad Request because RFC 2616 said (with emphasis mine): The request could not be understood … Read more
Make a separate set of /memberships/ resources. REST is about making evolvable systems if nothing else. At this moment, you may only care that a given player is on a given team, but at some point in the future, you will want to annotate that relationship with more data: how long they’ve been on that … Read more
I’ve tried both design strategies – nested and non-nested endpoints. I’ve found that: if the nested resource has a primary key and you don’t have its parent primary key, the nested structure requires you to get it, even though the system doesn’t actually require it. nested endpoints typically require redundant endpoints. In other words, you … Read more
A Step Back First and foremost, REST describes a URI as a universally unique ID. Far too many people get caught up on the structure of URIs and which URIs are more “restful” than others. This argument is as ludicrous as saying naming someone “Bob” is better than naming him “Joe” – both names get … Read more
If your action is not idempotent, then you MUST use POST. If you don’t, you’re just asking for trouble down the line. GET, PUT and DELETE methods are required to be idempotent. Imagine what would happen in your application if the client was pre-fetching every possible GET request for your service – if this would … Read more
For the searching, use querystrings. This is perfectly RESTful: /cars?color=blue&type=sedan&doors=4 An advantage to regular querystrings is that they are standard and widely understood and that they can be generated from form-get.
Simple explanation about SOAP and REST SOAP – “Simple Object Access Protocol” SOAP is a method of transferring messages, or small amounts of information, over the Internet. SOAP messages are formatted in XML and are typically sent using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). Rest – Representational state transfer Rest is a simple way of sending and … Read more
The best way to implement a RESTful search is to consider the search itself to be a resource. Then you can use the POST verb because you are creating a search. You do not have to literally create something in a database in order to use a POST. For example: Accept: application/json Content-Type: application/json POST … Read more
Unfortunately, there are a lot of misinformation and misconceptions around REST. Not only your question and the answer by @cmd reflect those, but most of the questions and answers related to the subject on Stack Overflow. SOAP and REST can’t be compared directly, since the first is a protocol (or at least tries to be) … Read more
The fundamental explanation is: No client session state on the server. By stateless it means that the server does not store any state about the client session on the server side. The client session is stored on the client. The server is stateless means that every server can service any client at any time, there … Read more