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I have very general question. For example, I have employee table which includes name, address, age, gender, dept etc.. When a user wants to see overall employee information, I do not need extract whole columns from DB. I want to show overall employee information first by grouping employees' names per dept. And then, a user can select one particular employee if he/she has more interest. To implement this, which approach will be better.

1) Apply two different APIs which will produce two different data results by applying different queries. Therefore, if I take this approach, even though I have to call two different APIs, it seems effective.

2) Apply one API which will produce one data result including whole employee relevant columns even though the overall employee information does not need entire detail employee information. Once I get this data, I can re-format employee information by manipulating already extracted data from the front-end side according to different needs.

Normally, which approach developers take between 1) and 2)? I think 1) makes sense, but API will be too much specialized, not generalized. Is it a desirable way to manipulate data gotten from back-end side(RESTful) in a front-end side(Angular 2)? Which approach is preferred between creating relatively much more numbers of specialized APIs or manipulating the data in the front-end once after getting whole data? If there is some criteria to take which approach, on which ground I have to consider? Is this is correct thinking? If someone has some idea about it, could you give some guide?

Anna Lee
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That's a very interesting discussion. If you need a very optimized application then you would need to go with the first option. Also if you have some column on the employee that can be accessed only by a privileged user, you can imagine that a client side manipulation won't stop some malicious hacker from seeing it. In this case you must implement the first option as well.

The drawback is that at some point you could have too many APIs doing very similar things making It confusing and unproductive.

About the second option, as you pointed out having generalized APIs is a good thing, so in order to speed up the development process and have a cleaner set of APIs you can waste few internet traffic in return.

You need to balance your needs.

  • Is it optimization of resources? Like speed in terms of database queries and internet requests.
  • Or is it development time? Do you have enough time to implement all these things and optimizations?
Marcelo Henrique
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