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

I don't see the point in doing this either and I think it is not the best URI design. As a user of a RESTful service I'd expect the list resource to have the same name no matter whether I access the list or specific resource 'in' the list. You should use the same identifiers no matter whether you want use the list resource or a specific resource.

Answer 2

Whereas the most prevalent practice are RESTful apis where plurals are used e.g. /api/resources/123 , there is one special case where I find use of a singular name more appropriate/expressive than plural names. It is the case of one-to-one relationships. Specifically if the target item is a value object(in Domain-driven-design paradigm).

Let us assume every resource has a one-to-one accessLog which could be modeled as a value object i.e not an entity therefore no ID. It could be expressed as /api/resources/123/accessLog. The usual verbs (POST, PUT, DELETE, GET) would appropriately express the intent and also the fact that the relationship is indeed one-to-one.

Answer 3

I prefer using singular form for both simplicity and consistency.

For example, considering the following url:

/customer/1

I will treat customer as customer collection, but for simplicity, the collection part is removed.

Another example:

/equipment/1

In this case, equipments is not the correct plural form. So treating it as a equipment collection and removing collection for simplicity makes it consistent with the customer case.

Answer 4

How about:

/resource/ (not /resource)

/resource/ means it's a folder contains something called "resource", it's a "resouce" folder.

And also I think the naming convention of database tables is the same, for example, a table called 'user' is a "user table", it contains something called "user".