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I'm designing a RESTful API and I'm trying to work out how I could represent a predicate with OR an operator when querying for a resource.

For example if I had a resource Foo with a property Name, how would you search for all Foo resources with a name matching "Name1" OR "Name2"?

This is straight forward when it's an AND operator as I could do the following: http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1&Age=19

The other approach I've seen is to post the search in the body.

dhaken
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2 Answers2

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You will need to pick your own approach, but I can name few that seem to be pretty logical (although not without disadvantages):

Option 1.: Using | operator:

http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1|Name2

Option 2.: Using modified query param to allow selection by one of the values from the set (list of possible comma-separated values):

http://www.website.com/Foo?Name_in=Name1,Name2

Option 3.: Using PHP-like notation to provide list instead of single string:

http://www.website.com/Foo?Name[]=Name1&Name[]=Name2

All of the above mentioned options have one huge advantage: they do not interfere with other query params.

But as I mentioned, pick your own approach and be consistent about it across your API.

Tadeck
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  • Thanks for that, this was the way I was considering doing it. I also considered what Ayman said which also seems good for complex queries – dhaken Mar 04 '13 at 15:16
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Well one quick way to fixing that is to add an additional parameter that is identifying the relationship between your parameters wether they're an and or an or for example:

http://www.website.com/Foo?Name=Name1&Age=19&or=true

Or for much more complex queries just keep a single parameter and in it include your whole query by making up your own little query language and on the server side you would parse the whole string and extract the information and the statement.

Ayman Farhat
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