best practice for boolean REST results
- by Andrew Patterson
I have a resource
/system/resource
And I wish to ask the system a boolean question about the resource that can't
be answered by processing on the client (i.e I can't just GET the resource
and look through the actual resource data - it requires some processing
on the backend using data not available to the client). eg
/system/resource/related/otherresourcename
I want this is either return true or false. Does anyone have any
best practice examples for this type of interaction?
Possibilities that come to my mind:
use of HTTP status code, no returned body (smells wrong)
return plain text string (True, False, 1, 0) -
Not sure what string values are appropriate to use, and furthermore
this seems to be ignoring the Accept media type and always returning
plain text
come up with a boolean object for each of my support media types
and return the appropriate type (a JSON document with a single boolean
result, an XML document with a single boolean field). However this seems unwieldy.
I don't particularly want to get into a long discussion about the true meaning of a
RESTful system etc - I have used the word REST in the title because it
best expresses the general flavour of system I am designing (even if perhaps I
am tending more towards RPC over the web rather than true REST). However, if
someone has some thoughts on how a true RESTful system avoids this problem
entirely I would be happy to hear them.
