Imagine you have two entities, Player and Team, where players can be on multiple teams. In my data model, I have a table for each entity, and a join table to maintain the relationships. Hibernate is fine at handling this, but how might I expose this relationship in a RESTful API?
I can think of a couple of ways. First, I might have each entity contain a list of the other, so a Player object would have a list of Teams it belongs to, and each Team object would have a list of Players that belong to it. So to add a Player to a Team, you would just POST the player’s representation to an endpoint, something like POST /player or POST /team with the appropriate object as the payload of the request. This seems the most “RESTful” to me, but feels a little weird.
/api/team/0:
{
name: 'Boston Celtics',
logo: '/img/Celtics.png',
players: [
'/api/player/20',
'/api/player/5',
'/api/player/34'
]
}
/api/player/20:
{
pk: 20,
name: 'Ray Allen',
birth: '1975-07-20T02:00:00Z',
team: '/api/team/0'
}
The other way I can think of to do this would be to expose the relationship as a resource in its own right. So to see a list of all the players on a given team, you might do a GET /playerteam/team/{id} or something like that and get back a list of PlayerTeam entities. To add a player to a team, POST /playerteam with an appropriately built PlayerTeam entity as the payload.
/api/team/0:
{
name: 'Boston Celtics',
logo: '/img/Celtics.png'
}
/api/player/20:
{
pk: 20,
name: 'Ray Allen',
birth: '1975-07-20T02:00:00Z',
team: '/api/team/0'
}
/api/player/team/0/:
[
'/api/player/20',
'/api/player/5',
'/api/player/34'
]
What is the best practice for this?
