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

Quite an old question but I had the same and finnaly found the solution : use regex in your path param.

Here's how I coded that use case

@GET
@Path("/{id : \\d+}")
@Produces(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response getById(@PathParam("id") long id) {
 <>
}

@GET
@Path("/{name}")
@Produces(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response getByName(@PathParam("name") String name) {
 <>
}