REST - supporting multiple possible identifiers

Question

For the site I am working on, we are in the process of improving our URLs for one type of resource - specifically, moving away from numerical IDs toward unique, descriptive

Answer 1

Your first option is probably the best.

Searching for users by ID:

/users/id/48573

Searching for users by short name:

/users/name/thisisausername

If they leave out that path parameter, you could always default to your new short username format.

Another option that I have seen quite a bit is to use query parameters like the following:

/users?id=48573
/users?name=thisisausername

I think the first looks a bit cleaner and more readable.