Why do I need a trailing slash for the root URI in Spring Data Rest?

Question

I'm using Spring Data Rest. I can access a resource from the command line using httpie with:

http :8080/myapp/books

but if I try to access the root URI

http :8080/myapp

I obtain a 302 redirection:

HTTP/1.1 302 
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 13:30:57 GMT
Location: http://localhost:8080/myapp/
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Testing this url in Firefox redirects me to http://localhost:8080/myapp/ and display correctly the list of resources. If I add a trailing slash with httpie:

http :8080/myapp/

I obtain the list of resources. Why do I have to add a trailing slash to avoid the redirect? Can someone explain me the logic behind this behavior?

P.S.: I'm running the application with Spring Boot, from STS.

Answer 1

I think the answer is If you add a trailing / it will be understood as a resource group but without that trailing / we can not say that, the last part of the url myapp may be the resource id, so it needs to check for the resource with id myapp first if it does not exist then it will take it as a resource bundle/group and redirects by appending /. The / indicates that the result will be a group, but without slash it will think as a resource with id. Ex. users/user fetching user with id user. users/ fetching the set of users. So it will check for the id first if it did not find any resource, then appends a / and redirect.

For more info refer the link https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/186959/trailing-slash-in-restful-api