Month: April 2019

I believe the response to the question is going to be different for every API, in my case I initially added them where I thought it made sense, at the level I thought I wanted to summarise.

To view the list of items assigned to a resource in the Costs to Expect API you browse as below;
/resource-type/[id]/resource/[id]/items.
To view the TCO (Total cost of ownership) for a resource, I added a summary route at /resource-type/[id]/resource/[id]/summary/tco.

This initially made sense, however, later, as I was adding year and month summaries my solution began to become unwieldy, longterm, I would end up with two mismatching trees, the main tree for the API and then another summary tree, secondly, using this structure, where would I put a summary for multiple resources?

I’ve come up with a solution that I think will solve my problems, there should be a summary route for every API endpoint, the summary routes are then merely the route prefixed with /summary.

In the case of the TCO for a resource, the summary route would be summary/resource-type/[id]/resource/[id]/items. No TCO in the URI, it is not necessary, you are summarising the items collection so you should expect a total.

My solution doesn’t fix all the issues, presently the annual summary for a resource lives at /resource-type/[id]/resource/[id]/summary/years. There is no matching endpoint for this summary route. The solution, GET parameters. The items collection has four filtering parameters, year, month, category and subcategory; the summary route should support the same parameters.

I’m confident that if I had spent a little more time researching I would have been able to find this solution in an article somewhere online, I didn’t and unfortunately, it took me a little while to realise. Hopefully, this blog post will help at least one other person.

A core rule of the Internet, don’t change a URI. I’m going to change some, why, we all make mistakes.

I released the initial version of the Costs to Expect API during the summer of ’18. It turns out when you review your code/API after a short break you spot all the issues you were oblivious to during development.

Over the next 12 months, I’m going to extend the Costs to Expect API, an API that I intend on maintaining for a significant period; I need to record data for at least the next 13 years.

If there were one small issue with the URIs, I’d deal with it, change a couple of URIs and add redirects. There are numerous issues; I am not happy with the initial summary routes. I favour dashes in the URIs over underscores, some of the words are incorrect and other minor issues.

We haven’t pushed the service; it doesn’t exist. As far as I am aware I am the only consumer of the API. I believe it is OK to modify the URIs, as long as I do not modify them again they should remain the same for twenty times longer then they have existed.