Is there a canonical/RESTful way to send query details to a server during a GET?

Question

I\'m designing a (more or less) RESTful internal web service running on ASP.NET and IIS. I want clients to be able to pass query details to the server when accessing large

Answer 1

I would think about "RESTful querying" as having two resources: Query and QueryResult.

You POST your Query to one end-point (e.g. "POST /queries/") and receive a CREATED Status back with the URI of your specific query (/queries/123) and a nice and RESTful hypertext body telling you the URL of your query result (e.g. /result/123 ). Then you access your query result with a GET /result/123. (Bonus points if you use hypertext to link back to /queries/123 so that the consumer of the query result can check and modify the query.

To elaborate the point I'm trying to make:

If RESTful is basically reduced to "map business entities to URIs" than the obvious question arises: "how can I query a subset of my entities"? Often the solution is "adding a query string to the 'all entities of this type'-URL" - Why else would it be called "query string"?. But it starts to feel "wrong" - as stated in the OP - if you want to have a full fledged query interface.

The reason is that with this requirement the Query becomes a full business object itself and is no longer an addendum to an resource address. It's no longer secondary but primary. It becomes important enough to become a resource in its own right - with it's own address (e.g. URL) and representation.