Paging in a Rest Collection

Question

I\'m interested in exposing a direct REST interface to collections of JSON documents (think CouchDB or Persevere). The problem I\'m running into is how to handle the G

Answer 1

I think the real problem here is that there is nothing in the spec that tells us how to do automatic redirects when faced with 413 - Requested Entity Too Large.

I was struggling with this same problem recently and I looked for inspiration in the RESTful Web Services book. Personally I don't think 206 is appropriate due to the header requirement. My thoughts also led me to 300, but I thought that was more for different mime-types, so I looked up what Richardson and Ruby had to say on the subject in Appendix B, page 377. They suggest that the server just pick the preferred representation and send it back with a 200, basically ignoring the notion that it should be a 300.

That also jibes with the notion of links to next resources that we have from atom. The solution I implemented was to add "next" and "previous" keys to the json map I was sending back and be done with it.

Later on I started thinking maybe the thing to do is send a 307 - Temporary Redirect to a link that would be something like /db/questions/1,25 - that leaves the original URI as the canonical resource name, but it gets you to an appropriately named subordinate resource. This is behavior I'd like to see out of a 413, but 307 seems a good compromise. Haven't actually tried this in code yet though. What would be even better is for the redirect to redirect to a URL containing the actual IDs of the most recently asked questions. For example if each question has an integer ID, and there are 100 questions in the system and you want to show the ten most recent, requests to /db/questions should be 307'd to /db/questions/100,91

This is a very good question, thanks for asking it. You confirmed for me that I'm not nuts for having spent days thinking about it.