Questions tagged [api-design]
Application Programming Interface (API) Design discusses best practises for creating libraries intended for general purpose or public use.
1,168 questions
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Should pagination metadata like totalCount be included in the ETag for cached paginated API responses?
I am currently rethinking my API response schema and caching strategy while implementing ETag-based caching for a paginated REST API (for example, listing places).
Each paginated response looks like ...
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How to pass arguments of a complex search in RESTful API request params
I’m building an app that lets users manage data across multiple tables. I also expose an API so they can fetch their data and process it in external services.
I’d like to enhance the API to support ...
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Is there anything that rest APIs can do that GraphQL still cannot do?
I just started learning about the specification, but I still have some doubts about why GraphQL simply hasn't replaced REST since it was created.
REST APIs are very inflexible and straightforward. ...
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Serving several external APIs in Django + Angular application
I'm working on a web-based app that uses Django and Angular. This app uses several external APIs to fetch environmental data from different monitoring networks. We then use these data to perform ...
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Microservice Architecture Design
I want to create one service that reads data from two databases and passes it to the customer devices. Is this an overall bad design decision? I think that since it is only read-only, it should be ...
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Contract extensibility as it relates to enums and type unions
Say I have a contract returning a type:
type CreditCard = {
scheme: "Visa" | "Mastercard"
}
and later we decided to include Amex as card type, then making this change:
type ...
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Should I split endpoints by parameter requirements?
Preface: This will not be available publicly or to third parties, so I am not concerned about users having the background knowledge to properly form GET requests. These are also not only analytical ...
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Could concurrent user-triggered data fetches and inserts lead to deadlocks in a multi-user ASP.NET Core + MSSQL application?
I'm facing a tricky situation that might result from a not thoroughly thought-out design, and I'm hoping to understand whether a deadlock might be a realistic cause – and if so, how to prevent similar ...
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Allowing POST as fallback for GET when query would exceed maximum length of URL
A typical search query looks something like
GET example.com/entity/search?q=John
If we want to add some filtering to this endpoint, we could for example add ...&filter= followed by a URL encoding ...
- 957
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How does HTML-based HATEOAS apply in applications which also want to expose an external API?
I recently read through Hypermedia Systems, and found its arguments incredibly compelling. The book brought a lot of clarity and structure to ideas and frustrations that have been bouncing around in ...
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System design for tracking viewed posts and returning unseen posts
I came across this system design question and have been wondering what is a good approach.
Requirement :
We have a typical blog or a mini social media kind of website where users create "Posts&...
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What is the root cause of a proliferation of "null checks"?
I work with a lot of Groovy code. One feature of the language is the "safe navigation operator" (?), which I think of as an inline null check. There are many things about Groovy that I like, ...
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Should I let objects, whose copying is "costly", be naively copyable?
I'm devising an API - or actually, a wrapper API for another, lower-level API - in a programming language with objects.
This API represents some entity E which is reference-counted (for example - a ...
- 2,808
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Testing for non-existence of a method in API
I am designing a fluent builder pattern API that branches and allows different options based on what has already been called.
For example: Build().Foo().Bar() is valid code, but Build().Baz().Bar() ...
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How to design for API use cases that need different data from the same table?
I am building a web application. This application is meant to be a home for player rankings and tournament results for a competitive community. I have planned to do this in three layers: a database to ...
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