Wednesday, May 1, 2024

10 best practices for REST API design LogRocket Blog

api design best practices

HTTP mapping features are used by GoogleAPIs and Cloud Endpoints gRPC APIs for JSON/HTTP to Protocol Buffers/RPCtranscoding. Radix UI is quickly rising in popularity and has become an excellent go-to solution for building modern design systems and websites. Mutative processes data with better performance than both Immer and native reducers. Accelerate your API development and collaboration with open source mock servers powered by Prism, a Stoplight open source project.

Implement Pagination

The documentation helps make developers' lives a lot easier, too. Inside the first middleware we'll check if the user is authenticated. If this is true, we'll go to the next middleware, that would be the one for checking the user's role.

api design best practices

Versioning Strategies

This option will not be open to everyone, because you can't always get all the data into a database. If you can, it enables the queries to execute on a standard database query engine and, more importantly perhaps, execute very close to where the data is stored. To ensure the client interprets JSON data correctly, you should set the Content-Type type in the response header to application/json while making the request. User roles would also make sense in our use case when we only want specific users (like coaches) to create, update, and delete our workouts and records.

Use JSON for the payload

Observation studies suggest that developers spend more than 51% of their time in editor and client as compared to ~18% on reference. Another option here is to use something like GraphQL to allow for this type of customizability. While you don't want to design your APIs for vaporware, thinking about the big picture can make it easier to build non-breaking changes in the future. For example the image below showcases APIs offered by Google Maps. Even without diving into the documentation, looking at the names like “Autocomplete” or “Address Validation” clearly outlines the purposes and potential fit for a customer’s use case. Naturally, you would expect to be able to create, list, update, and delete contacts.

When it comes to separating words in REST API endpoint names, hyphens wear the crown. They significantly improve readability and reduce confusion, making them the preferred choice over underscores. Using hyphens as separators in URIs is a universally understood practice that enhances clarity for developers and users interacting with the API.

Query parameters grant clients the ability to customize the API response to suit their needs. This flexibility leads to more efficient data transfer and improved user experience. When there is no hierarchical relationship between items within query parameters, a comma should be utilized for separation, following an established convention in REST APIs.

Principled API Design at the Heart of Canva's Apps SDK - InfoQ.com

Principled API Design at the Heart of Canva's Apps SDK.

Posted: Wed, 22 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

In short, you should let the HTTP verbs handle what the endpoints do. So GET would retrieve data, POST will create data, PUT will update data, and DELETE will get rid of the data. For server-side frameworks, on the other hand, many of them set the Content-Type automatically. Express, for example, now has the express.json() middleware for this purpose.

api design best practices

Best practices for REST API design

We're just throwing it back, so we can adjust our responses later inside our controller. We already caught the case that the request body is not built up properly and got missing keys that we expect. For example, returning something like "The username is already signed up" should be well thought out because you're providing information about your users that you should really hide. Now you can go to your HTTP client, send the POST request again, and you should receive the newly created workout as JSON.

Whenever you're ready

Interactive documentation means that consumers can test requests against your API, supply their own inputs and see the response inline. API design is the collection of planning and architectural decisions you make when building an API. Your basic API design influences how well developers are able to consume it and even how they use it. REST APIs should have different versions, so you don’t force clients (users) to migrate to new versions. This might even break the application if you're not careful.

Strategies include URI versioning, header versioning, and body versioning, each with its advantages and difficulties. Maintaining backward compatibility through API versioning ensures smooth transitions for API evolution and prevents disrupting users with breaking changes. Combining sorting and pagination allows users to navigate through sorted data. And what happens if all else is good but the server-side programming style is a “spaghetti code”?

If your API is part of a commercial offering, then that translates into profit or loss. The web has endless sites and pages advocating “API design”, “Best Practices” and so on.API design is about 80% commonsense and the rest, technical. IntroductionAs the internet continues to evolve, APIs are becoming a crucial part of web development and application design. One of the most widely used design models for APIs is the Representational State Transfer, or REST. To ensure that APIs are efficient, scalable, and easy to understand, they must be carefully designed.

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