设计Rest API

Question

Firstly, I am new to web frameworks. We are using Meteor. I have a Students Collection:

Students = new Mongo.Collection('students');

Currently, we are defining a Rest API as:

// Maps to: /api/getAllStudents
Restivus.addRoute('getAllStudents', {authRequired: false}, {
    get: function () {
        var students = Students.find().fetch();
        if (students.length > 0) {
            return {status: 'success',count:students.length,data: students};
        }
        else {
        return {
            statusCode: 404,
            body: {status: 'fail', message: 'Students not found'}
        };
    }}
});
};

Now, There can be another API getStudentByName as

// Maps to: /api/getStudentByName by name
Restivus.addRoute('getStudentByName', {authRequired: false}, {
    get: function () {
        var obj = {};
        for(var key in this.queryParams){
            var val = this.queryParams[key];
            obj[key] = val;
        }
        var students = Students.find(obj).fetch();
        if (student.length > 0) {
            return {status: 'success',count: students.length, data: students};
        }
        return {
            statusCode: 404,
            body: {status: 'fail', message: 'Students not found'}
        };
    }
});

Currently I am accessing them as

http://localhost:3000/api/getAllStudents

and

http://localhost:3000/api/getStudentByName?name='abc'

I will have many more such API's for Students (Get, put, post, delete). Also, I have many more resources like Teachers, Classes, etc. For each there will be set of API's defined. Now, I want to design my API's in a neater way(I know this is very vague and unorganized). I want to eventually call them as

http://localhost:3000/api/Students/getAllStudents http://localhost:3000/api/Students/getStudentByName?name='abc'

Right now, I have a Student-api.js where I have placed these 2 API's and classes-api.js and teachers-api.js containing their own respective API's. But, that's just too unstructured. Can "something" like namespacing be used? Any help is really welcomed..

Answer 1

A REST API should not contain verbs. The verb is provided by HTTP.

// All Students 
GET http://localhost:3000/api/students

A possible way is to provide a filter param

// Students named Mark
GET http://localhost:3000/api/students?filter=name%3DMark

// Teachers whose last name is Johnson
GET http://localhost:3000/api/students?filter=lastName%3DJohnson   

This is the beauty of REST APIs using a uniform interface. Now all your API calls can support the same filter parameter.

The following is a simple example for equality matching on a single field that probably needs to be adjusted since I haven't tested it. You can improve it to make the filtering smarter by supporting multiple fields and different operators.

var filterableCollections = ['students', 'teachers'];
filterableCollections.forEach(function(collectionName) {
    var Collection = new Mongo.Collection(collectionName);
    Restivus.addRoute(collectionName, {authRequired: false}, {
        get: function() {
            var items;
            var filter = this.queryParams.filter;
            if (filter) {
                var fieldNameValue = filter.split('=');
                var queryObj = {};
                queryObj[fieldNameValue[0]] = fieldNameValue[1];
                items = Collection.find(queryObj).fetch();
            } else {
                items = Collection.find().fetch();
            }

            var response; 
            if (items.length > 0) {
                response = {status: 'success', count: items.length, data: items};
            } else {
                response = {
                    statusCode: 404,
                    body: {status: 'fail', message: collectionName  + ' not found'}
                };
            }
            return response;
        }
    });
});

---

Note: %3D is the URL encoding of =