A large amount of what I thought I knew about REST is apparently wrong - and I\'m not alone. This question has a long lead-in, but it seems to be necessary because the infor
The one exception to giving instruction on how to build URIs is that it is permissible to send a URI template in the hypertext response, with fields to be substituted automatically by the client, using other fields in the hypertext. This doesn't usually end up saving much bandwidth though since gzip compression will handle the repeated parts of URIs well enough to not bother with this.
Some good discussions on REST and the related HATEOAS:
Advantages Of (Also) Using HATEOAS In RESTFul APIs
How to GET a cup of coffee