Should null values be included in JSON responses from a REST API? [closed]

Answer 1

There is no clear winner. And because there is not, clients should never technically depend on any convention about this, clients should not expect either shape.

• removing null values to reduce bandwidth usage is commonly not justified (unless the number of null fields is large and the bandwidth noticeably suffers).
• removing null values to allow human readers to more easily see actual values is not commonly justified, APIs are not man-machine interfaces
• keeping null values to allow human readers to more easily see document structure is not commonly justified, APIs are not man-machine interfaces, and API responses are not API documentation
• keeping null values to allow dirty clients to parse the json in specific ways is commonly not justified, clients should be written cleanly as tolerant readers
• keeping null values only where the corresponding create method (POST/PUT) requires explicit passing of null would make sense, but is commonly difficult to achieve
• keeping the output same as the request during creation could make sense when each document has its own owning client, but is commonly difficult to achieve
• A special case to consider is partial responses triggered by something like ?fields=foo,bar where returning nulls for all other fields seems a bit counter-intuitive

Answer 2

There was a discussion about this recently on API-Craft. The general consensus was there is potentially a semantic difference between the omission of a value, versus an inclusion of a null value.

If there is no semantic value to be gained for your specific use case, then I would say look at your target consumers of the API, and think about whether omitting the value will cause them problems.