how to design REST API when resources have multiple states

Question

I am going to design REST API for incident reporting in my web application. An incident has three states. ie investigation incident,resolved and postmortem. I use three database tables for each state.I want to design rest api for creating new incident to database. Here new incident means that incident in investigation state.

I have tried two approaches for designing rest api. In first approach I consider three states as sub resources.

POST - /incident/investigation
POST - /incident/resolved
POST - /incident/postmortem

In second approach, I think to pass incident state in http response of POST method.

POST-/incident

What is the best way to design REST API?

Answer 1

A REST API should identify the resource, so you'd have something like /incident/123 to denote incident number 123. And /incident/123/status would be the current status of that particular incident.

As each incident is in exclusively one state, you don't have the "multiple states" problem.