Spring RequestMapping Controller annotation and create a different absolute path inside the same Controller

Question

From the perpective of Restful Apis, its said its a good choice to design them hierarchical when your database is hierarchical too, above all because the client learns and knows the hierarchical structure of the entities. I mean, for instance, if you have bank clients and accounts, the parent entity would be the clients and the child entities would be the accounts. So :

To get the accounts from the client 1, a right URI could be something like "/clients/1/accounts"

From the perspective of Spring controllers, I should have a ClientController and a AccountController but

The AccountController should process the above request, right?
Could I specify and URI like "accounts/?clientId=1"? Its a bad design?

If I go with the option 1, how to specify this URI in the AccountsController?? If not, should I create another controller just for this and not put this URI in the Account controller?

 @RequestMapping("/clients")
 public class ClientsController{ }


 @RequestMapping("/accounts")
 public class AccountsController{

    @RequestMapping("/clients/{idClient}/accounts") => **I cannot specify 
   an absolute path here because 
    its relative to the RequestMapping annotation in the Controller**
   @GetMapping   
    public @ResponseBody List<Account> getAccounts(){}


 }

Thanks!!

Shubham · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-21 17:48:27Z

1

There's no hard bound rules it's matter of choice and use cases that decides how we structure our rest uris and using query param or path variables is for constructing meaningful and readable uris.

Suppose if you have.usecase is like to get the list of accounts needs a client ID as mandatory then construct:

GET /clients/{id}/accounts And put it in clients controller.

But if your usecase is like client id is not mandatory to get list of accounts then construct: GET /accounts?clientid=1 And put it in accounts controller. Now you can choose to make clientid as required=false request param.

Don't construct deeply nested APIs.. make dumb endpoints eventually you'll end up facing usecases where you'll need to create non nested uris.

answered Jun 21, 2020 at 17:48

Shubham

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