REST URI convention - Singular or plural name of resource while creating it

Question

I\'m new to REST and I\'ve observed that in some RESTful services they use different resource URI for update/get/delete and Create. Such as

• Create - using

Answer 1

To me plurals manipulate the collection, whereas singulars manipulate the item inside that collection.

Collection allows the methods GET / POST / DELETE

Item allows the methods GET / PUT / DELETE

For example

POST on /students will add a new student in the school.

DELETE on /students will remove all the students in the school.

DELETE on /student/123 will remove student 123 from the school.

It might feel like unimportant but some engineers sometimes forget the id. If the route was always plural and performed a DELETE, you might accidentally wipe your data. Whereas missing the id on the singular will return a 404 route not found.

To further expand the example if the API was supposed to expose multiple schools, then something like

DELETE on /school/abc/students will remove all the students in the school abc.

Choosing the right word sometimes is a challenge on its own, but I like to maintain plurality for the collection. E.g. cart_items or cart/items feels right. In contrast deleting cart, deletes the cart object it self and not the items within the cart ;).