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

An interesting problem. I don't have the specifics on what you are trying to do, but I wonder if it is too much to gracefully handle with one resource. You may want to break it up into several different types depending on the main characteristics of the request. If you are just trying to expose what should be a SQL query through an HTTP request, then I don't think there is any way it can can be implemented without a mess. Just pass the SQL query in the query string and stop trying to find a proper way to do it - it doesn't exist.

Answer 2

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.