Questions tagged [api-design]
Application Programming Interface (API) Design discusses best practices for creating interfaces between computer programs, web servers or libraries intended for general purpose or public use. In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other.
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How to deal with public vs private version of same resource in a RESTFul API?
I am having a hard time to deal with one particular issue in API design that might be very common. Let me give the concrete example I have: I am writing a RESTFul API for a store and have the ...
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Is this proper usage for std::expected and std::optional?
I am trying to improve the readability of my code and make things more self documenting (or at the very least learn new things about C++) for example:
// OLD
Texture LoadTexture(const std::string& ...
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Is This A Good API Design For A Programming Language C API? [closed]
I am designing an interface for C code to add functions and modules to my programming language. I am wondering if this is an OK design for a println function.
This function would take in a vararg of ...
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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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API Design: Should I explicitly check for and throw on nullptr parameters if I have full control?
Say I have the following header
#ifndef WINDOW_HPP
#define WINDOW_HPP
// includes...
namespace window
{
struct Window
{
GLFWwindow *handle = nullptr;
};
struct ...
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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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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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Should you write your back-end as an API?
I had a heated discussion today about our MVC application. We have a website written in MVC (ASP.NET), and it usually follows the pattern of do something in the view -> hit the controller -> ...
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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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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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Is exposing full backend entities to a Vue frontend a bad practice? A case for DTOs?
I am doing the frontend for a Java Spring backend. The project uses JavaFX for the front but I a migrating it for web usage (with VueJS). When I make an API call to retrieve an object, I am receiving ...
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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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Should the solution be as generic as possible or as specific as possible?
Say I have a entity that has "type" attribute. There could be 20+ possible types.
Now I'm asked to implement something that would allow changing the type from A->B, which is the only use case.
So ...
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Why do so many standards for JSON API response formats contain a "success" property in the response body instead of just using HTTP status codes?
I was researching about best practices for standardised JSON response formats for APIs, according to various sources available online general consensus looks something like this:
//Successful request:...
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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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