如何使用 REST API 和 HATEOAS 实现多步表单

Question

I would like to create a REST API with using HATEOAS to create multi-step form. Each step will be a separate endpoint that offers the data to select, and in the last step, all the collected data will be stored in the database. Is there any design pattern or best practice?

Thank you for answer.

Answer 1

The idea that comes to my mind to solve this problem is to have different entities for each step of the compilation. That is, the starting point will have an action describing the first step (which could be an action or a link, with more or less descriptive list of fields to provide, according to the format you use), which will return a new entity with another action describing the second step, and so on until the final step is reached.

Though, in order to respect REST/HATEOAS principles, I think this will force you to save entities on the server for each step (probably short-lived ones, that will be removed at the final step and "garbage-collected" by some cron job or the like to avoid partial compilation to clutter your storage), which may be quite clunky. There could be some way to circumvent this, but I'm not sure how.

Answer 2

Generally I would take this approach:

• Each step is its own form.
• Each of those forms submit to a specific endpoint.
• The server stores the intermediate steps and returns the 'next step form'. You could store this in a storage system such as Redis.
• When the last form is submitted, take all the data from the intermediate steps and submit it.