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I have the following route with cars as a collection resource.

/api/v4/cars
/api/v4/cars/{carId}

Now I want to introduce a "Price per car", but this price is dependent on the input, not fixed. So when the user calls the pricing endpoint, it should send some data ex. color, enginse size etc. which then would determine the price for a car X.

My question now is, how this route should look like?

Does one of those make sense, what is the general approach one should take in such cases:

/api/v4/cars/{carId}/price
/api/v4/cars/{carId}/calculatePrice
/api/v4/cars/{carId}/getPrice
Sero Daniel
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1 Answers1

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So when the user calls the pricing endpoint, it should send some data ex. color, engines size etc. which then would determine the price for a car X.

Sounds like submitting a web form; on the web, you would end up with the data appearing as encoded key value pairs in the URI.

GET /2c5d1cd4-0259-4c2b-9ca3-6215426732b8?color=red&transmission=automatic

Aside from the fact that browsers already know how to encode form values into a query string, there's no particular advantage to using a query; you could do path segments instead if you wanted to

GET /2c5d1cd4-0259-4c2b-9ca3-6215426732b8/color/red/transmission/automatic

Clients that understand how URI templates work can handle just about any layout of information you are interested in. HTML processing on the web isn't quite sophisticated enough to handle arbitrary uri templates; encoded key value pairs is a nice answer if you care about those use cases.

/api/v4/cars/{carId}/price
/api/v4/cars/{carId}/calculatePrice
/api/v4/cars/{carId}/getPrice

These are all "fine"; consumer code really doesn't care. A key idea to keep in mind is that a URI is an identifier; which is to say it is the name of the document (resource) that it fetches. If you have a clear understanding of your domain, it should be relatively straight forward to work out what the name of the document is, and choose an identifier spelling that makes understanding/remembering/guessing easier for human beings.

VoiceOfUnreason
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