I am wondering if it is possible to adhere to REST principles when creating what will essentially amount to a BI tool.
In my scenario I have high data volume with 100,000's of IDs (frankly more than this but for the sake of this example let's go with that.). These are presented in a traditional table that allows for necessary features when accessing large data sets such as pagination. The user also has the ability to filter by one, or many of these ID's to drill down the data set as they see fit.
It is theoretically possible that the user would want to filter on 100 of the ID's, thus rendering a GET URI incredibly long. Which as I understand it would kind of break the resource identification principle of a REST API. Not to mention could potentially bump into the character limit in a GET request for certain browsers since the ID's may be quite long. Normally I would just use a POST since I can add all of the applied filters in the body and generate a where clause on the server.
Since a POST in a REST API is supposed to
Create a new entry in the collection.
By definition it would appear, at least to me that generating a complex query for something like this would mean that a REST API is not possible. Or does this perhaps mean that I am approaching the solution wrong (totally plausible).
It would seem that in my scenario using a GET simply isn't possible due to the potential length of the parameters. Thus I am forced to use a POST. Though using a POST as I am seems to violate REST style, which isn't the end of the world. I mostly just wanted to double check that I am not missing something and there is not a solution using a GET.
