Querystring in REST Resource url

Question

I had a discussion with a colleague today around using query strings in REST URLs. Take these 2 examples:

1. http://localhost/findbyproductcode/4xxheua
2. ht         


        

Answer 1

IMO the path component should always state what you want to retrieve. An URL like http://localhost/findbyproductcode does only say I want to retrieve something by product code, but what exactly?

So you retrieve contacts with http://localhost/contacts and users with http://localhost/users. The query string is only used for retrieving a subset of such a list based on resource attributes. The only exception to this is when this subset is reduced to one record based on the primary key, then you use something like http://localhost/contact/[primary_key].

That's my approach, your mileage may vary :)