Table Of Content
There are many different data formats but JSON (Javascript Object Notation) is a standardized format. OAuth combines passwords and tokens for highly secure login access to any system. The server first requests a password and then asks for an additional token to complete the authorization process.
Five elements of API design tools
At the end of this tip you'll find again the complete implementation for the other endpoints. To improve the experience we also can send a quick error message along with the error response. But as I've written in the introduction this isn't always very wise and should be considered by the engineer themself. That's the reason why it's always a good practice to return proper HTTP error codes for different cases. This helps the consumer or the engineer who built the API to identify the problem more easily.
Understanding resources and collections
It makes sense to take a look at API from these three perspective. APIs will be used by developers to integrate or build yet another system. However, the ultimate purpose is to solve the issues users of the final product faces. Looking at API from the perspective will give a complete picture of the API and user persona it will deal with.
Handle errors gracefully and return standard error codes
Programmers must develop a standard way to work on the client and server, share code and collaborate. The days of rolling your own networking using the sockets library in C are long gone. In essence, filter implements search, while sort allows the query to change the order preference. These are two of the most common features in e-commerce, or in any database.
How to Interpret and Apply The Guidelines
Oftentimes, different endpoints can be interlinked, so you should nest them so it's easier to understand them. Communication between the client (frontend) and the server (backend) isn't usually super direct. So we use an interface called an Application Programming Interface (or API) to act as an intermediary between the client and the server. API-first design is an approach to API design that prioritizes the quality of the API's interface contract.
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In basic authentication, the client sends the user name and password in the request header. It encodes them with base64, which is an encoding technique that converts the pair into a set of 64 characters for safe transmission. Unlike POST, sending the same PUT request multiple times in a RESTful web service gives the same result. As APIs become more common, this strategy is gaining ground, but not without its share of complications. For a network-based application, object modeling is pretty much more straightforward. There can be many things such as devices, managed entities, routers, modems, etc.
Respond with standard HTTP Error Codes
This has the huge advantage that we don't have to nest deeper our existing endpoint. The endpoint now becomes less manageable the more nesting we add to it. Therefore it's a good practice to store the URI to receive information about a member directly into the record.
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No request should skip layers because that would mess with the logic of the architecture and the benefits of organization and modularity it gives us. The matter of how many layers should your project have, what names should each layer have, and what actions should it handle is all a matter of discussion. So let's see what I think is a good approach for our example. I recently wrote this article where I explained the main differences between common API types nowadays. And this tutorial aims to show you an example of how you can fully implement a REST API.
Web services that implement REST architecture are called RESTful web services. However, you can use the terms REST API and RESTful API interchangeably. RESTful API is an interface that two computer systems use to exchange information securely over the internet.
Those comments that are inside your codebase are also a great documentation for yourself as the API developer, too. You don't have to visit the docs all the time when you want to know the documentation of a specific endpoint. You can just look it up at one place inside your source code. 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.
A Design-First approach means that APIs are treated as "first-class citizens" and everything about a project revolves around the idea that at the end these APIs will be consumed by clients. So based on the business requirements API development team first start describing API designs as an Open API document and collaborate with the stakeholders to gather feedback. Instead, development leads should create a policy that adds new APIs to some kind of centralized, editable system, such as a wiki. Create a visual map that lists API dependencies, and add links to a wiki page describing the API for each node within the map. These descriptions should use a standard template format that describes the API, the consumers, the maintainers, its location in the code and the tests that serve as examples. For instance, the OpenAPI open source language and tool is commonly used to define and document interfaces for APIs.
The big advantage is that we can work on new features or improvements on a new version while the clients are still using the current version and are not affected by breaking changes. Now that we have a really basic Express setup, we can extend our API with the following best practices. Even though this API is written in JavaScript and Express, the best practices are not limited to these tools. They can be applied to other programming languages or frameworks as well. Just keep in mind that projects are different and require different approaches.
We have to make sure that the API documentation uses simples language and is continually updated with new releases. Additionally, a user should not be able to access more data than needed. For example, user A accessing user B’s data poses a huge privacy and security threat.
As you can see, logical nesting makes sense when you have resources that can be tied together. Theoretically you can nest it how deep you want, but the rule of thumb here is to go three levels deep at a maximum. Things like "GET /api/v1/getAllWorkouts" or "DELETE api/v1/deleteWorkout/workoutId" are unnecessary. Using a separate URL for each one might be an overhead (and documentation) hell.
The server identifies each resource with unique resource identifiers. For REST services, the server typically performs resource identification by using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is similar to the website address that you enter into your browser to visit any webpage. The URL is also called the request endpoint and clearly specifies to the server what the client requires. Even if you're committed to the open process approach, try to use models and specifications to evolve your business's API thinking and prepare for the future.
API design should occur early in the API lifecycle in order to achieve alignment among key stakeholders and to help teams identify issues before they become ingrained. API design is also an important part of an effective API governance strategy, as it helps teams standardize API patterns that can be reused across their organization. If we choose to group users into a few roles, then the roles should have the permissions that cover all they need and no more. If we have more granular permissions for each feature that users have access to, then we have to make sure that admins can add and remove those features from each user accordingly. Also, we need to add some preset roles that can be applied to a group users so that we don’t have to do that for every user manually. In the code above, we have the req.query variable to get the query parameters.
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