How should I handle HATEOAS links and references in JSON? [closed]

Answer 1

I restarted this topic on the API-Craft google group and got some great responses.

The main advantages of the Array design are:

• multiple links for the same relationship
• multiple relationships for the same link without writing the link aggain
• the ability to order the links

The map of cause has better accessibility.

As far as structure goes there are a lot of possibilities:

• JSON-HAL: http://blog.stateless.co/post/13296666138/json-linking-with-hal or also http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html
• JSON-LD: http://json-ld.org/ (optionally using Hydra vocabulary)
• JSON-Schema: http://json-schema.org/ (theHyper Meta-Schema on the bottom of the page)
• Collection+JSON: http://amundsen.com/media-types/collection/

I guess i will go with HAL as it is the cleanest solution, the rest all look kind of... strange for json.

Answer 2

As far as structure goes, you could try looking at HAL (http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html) or JSON-LD: (http://json-ld.org/)

Answer 3

I think its so that you can offer multiple links based on the http method.

e.g.

"links": [ 
    {"rel": "sender", "method":"post", "href":"http://example.org/entity/1"},
    {"rel": "sender", "method":"put", "href":"http://example.org/entity/1"}, ... 
]

maybe you could adapt that to your idea

"sender": { 
     "href":"http://example.org/entity/1",
     "methods": ["put","post"]
}