I've wondered this too -- this seems like a common pattern in web apps, but
it seems like every API I've come across handles them differently. The one
consistency seems to be "q=" for free text search a la Google, but it would
be great to see other operations become conventional. I always try to
introduce "limit" and "offset" querystring params to my controllers that
deal in strait recordsets, but it would be great to have a helper I could
call to add filters to my sqlalchemy query object that would translate set,
standard methods passed to the controller method. It would be great to be
able to drop a like, in, startswith, endswith etc. strait into the
querystring -- and it would simplify the design of a lot of APIs.

Of course, this particular DSL may not work well in the querystring pattern
-- a lot of operations require a filter/field/value triplet
(startswith=name,Dean perhaps? fields won't have commas, right?). Still, if
it were simple and standard it could be pretty slick -- otherwise, it'll
start looking an awful lot like SPARQL in a url, and that's not really much
help to anybody.

As for relationships, yeah, from what I can tell two-deep class/id nesting
seems to be pretty standard.

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 9:11 AM, Alex Marandon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

>
> 2008/6/20 Sean Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > Therefore, I was planning on a web/web-
> > services approach using REST approaches.  It seems that dealing with
> > single collections is pretty straightforward, but I have a couple of
> > questions:
> >
> > 1)  What is the "standard" for filtering a single collection
> > (specifying some fields and some match criteria like "begins_with",
> > etc.)?
>
> I guess appending a query string to your resource collection path
> would be OK, wouldn't it?
> (ie: /authors/12/books?begin_with=foo)


I agree that that would be


>
>
> > 2)  How does one deal with relationships between collections?  It
> > looks like nested urls like:
> >
> > http://example.com/author/12/books
> >
> > are the correct way to handle this, but could someone enlighten me on
> > whether or not there is a standard?
>
> Routes has support for nested collections:
> http://routes.groovie.org/class-routes.base.Mapper.html#resource Look
> at the parent_resource argument.
> It seems to suggest that the standard would then be /authors/12/books.
>
> >
>

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