REST Best Practices

Definition

Advanced guidelines for building production-grade REST APIs, including versioning, filtering, sorting, pagination, and HATEOAS.

Explain Like I'm New

A beginner builds `GET /users` which returns 10 million users and crashes the server. An expert builds `GET /users?role=admin&sort=age:desc&page=2&limit=50`.

Real World Example

Building an E-commerce API. Clients need to filter products by price, sort them by rating, and paginate the results 20 at a time. All of this should be handled via URL Query Parameters.

Common Use Cases

•Scaling APIs
•Performance tuning

Terminal Output

bash / terminal

/* Advanced RESTful Querying via URL Parameters */ // Filtering (Find active admins) GET /users?role=admin&status=active // Sorting (Sort by creation date, descending) GET /users?sort=-created_at // Field Selection (Only return the name and email to save bandwidth) GET /users?fields=name,email // Pagination (Get page 3, 20 items per page) GET /users?page=3&limit=20 // Full combined production query: GET /products?category=shoes&sort=-price&limit=10&page=1

Interview Questions

basic

How should you handle filtering and sorting in a REST API?

intermediate

What is HATEOAS in REST?

Flash Cards

Question

Handle filtering/sorting?

Click to reveal answer

Answer

Using URL Query Parameters (the data after the `?` mark). Never use the URL path or the Request Body for filtering a GET request.

Question

What is HATEOAS?

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Answer

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State. It means an API response doesn't just return data; it returns HYPERLINKS to other actions you can take. (e.g., getting a User returns their data, plus a link to `rel: 'delete', href: '/users/5'` so the client knows how to delete them).