However you like, REST doesn’t dictate anything there. Just be consistent and use hypermedia.
JSON APIs almost never follow REST because they almost never use JSON as hypertext. Worse, no complete stable hypertext JSON standard exists. There’s JSON-HAL, but it lacks a way to represent resource templates (think HTML’s <form>).
Therefore, with JSON APIs ignoring one of the most basic idea behind REST, why would anyone expect them to follow another idea of REST - consistency?
REST is a deceptively simple concept. Any time you build an HTML website a human can navigate without consulting documentation, you’re doing it better than vast majority of swagger documented corporate APIs.
The argument probably goes something like " if you adhere strictly to REST the error codes are all you need" and then metadata can be sent in response headers.
how should a REST API respond to the client sending a URL the ends in a string instead of a numeric ID? like api.social/users/ceeforayteen instead of api.socail/users/11037
I would do a 400 (Bad Request). Then, with varying amounts of detail depending on the scale of the project and the framework capability, the response body would be something like:
{ “error”:true, “reason”: “validation”, “detail”: “user id should be numeric” }
JSON API almost always means “not REST”. In other words, it works as intended.
how would you return metadata or more detailed error codes?
However you like, REST doesn’t dictate anything there. Just be consistent and use hypermedia.
JSON APIs almost never follow REST because they almost never use JSON as hypertext. Worse, no complete stable hypertext JSON standard exists. There’s JSON-HAL, but it lacks a way to represent resource templates (think HTML’s
<form>).Therefore, with JSON APIs ignoring one of the most basic idea behind REST, why would anyone expect them to follow another idea of REST - consistency?
REST is a deceptively simple concept. Any time you build an HTML website a human can navigate without consulting documentation, you’re doing it better than vast majority of swagger documented corporate APIs.
The argument probably goes something like " if you adhere strictly to REST the error codes are all you need" and then metadata can be sent in response headers.
how should a REST API respond to the client sending a URL the ends in a string instead of a numeric ID? like api.social/users/ceeforayteen instead of api.socail/users/11037
I would do a 400 (Bad Request). Then, with varying amounts of detail depending on the scale of the project and the framework capability, the response body would be something like: { “error”:true, “reason”: “validation”, “detail”: “user id should be numeric” }
Depends on the verb and the application. If the string is valid 200, if it isn’t 400, 404.
It’s still just another type of ID so you can do lookups on it. Nothing would change. UUIDs are used all the time.