A nice modification would be to let developers override which object they receive. The API decides for you which length of response you’ll receive based on the type of data you are requesting. A venue request, for example, always has a name and location, but only shows the date created with a complete venue object response. Foursquare has compact and complete versions of most objects the API returns. We can see the fingerprint of the primary use case within their approach to API responses.

The location recommendations app is built on its own API. Here are how other APIs have approached the issue. An extra API call, at scale, could double the server costs of both sides.

Similarly, if a important field is excluded from the response, a developer may have to make a second request to fill in the missing data.Ī bit too much or too little data may seem trivial, but in aggregate they can have a huge impact. If an API responds with more data than a developer needs, both sides have paid a tiny latency penalty in the time and bandwidth required to transfer data nobody cares about at the moment. There are downsides to each situation, for both the developer and the API provider.

Include/Exclude Certain FieldsĪn API with a single approach to responses is likely to give developers much more or less data than they need. What about when you need to plan for what Daniel calls the “one-size-fits-all REST API?” Here are three different ways you can help developers declare the data they want from your API. This made sense because they are supporting a “small group of known developers” mostly inside Netflix. There is a translation layer that queries for the exact data needed by a client. In 2012, Netflix’s Daniel Jacobson shared how they created a unique endpoint for every device the company supports. Some APIs provide flexibility in the types and amount of data in their responses to help mitigate this.įor example, Netflix realized that to support the many devices that stream its videos, it needed a more flexible approach to its API. There are plenty of circumstances where what’s returned is not quite what a developer wants, though. That’s by design developers need to know what to expect. Most APIs deliver their responses the exact same way to every client.

Eventbrite api