REST api design to retrieve summary information

Posted by Jacques René Mesrine on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jacques René Mesrine
Published on 2010-03-30T08:14:48Z Indexed on 2010/03/30 8:33 UTC
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I have a scenario in which I have REST API which manages a Resource which we will call Group. A Group is similar in concept to a discussion forum in Google Groups.

Now I have two GET access method which I believe needs separate representations.

The 1st GET access method retrieves the minimal amount of information about a Group. Given a *group_id* it should return a minimal amount of information like

{ 
    group_id: "5t7yu8i9io0op",
    group_name: "Android Developers",
    is_moderated: true,
    number_of_users: 34,
    new_messages: 5,
    icon: "http://boo.com/pic.png"
}

The 2nd GET access method retrives summary information which are more statistical in nature like:

{ 
    group_id: "5t7yu8i9io0op",
    top_ranking_users: {
      [ { user: "george", posts: 789, rank: 1 }, 
        { user: "joel", posts: 560, rank: 2 }  ...]
    },
    popular_topics: {
      [ ... ]
    }
}

I want to separate these data access methods and I'm currently planning on this design:

GET /group/:group_id/
GET /group/:group_id/stat

Only the latter will return the statistical information about the group. What do you think about this ?

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