What if I want to implement a complicated query in REST

I would like to implement a REST service which is able to parse query such as retrieving the users created after startdate and before endate and with the privilege of admin. It seems that s开发者_StackOverflowtandard REST implementation could only query by ID. Do I need to self-defined protocol to make this kind of query possible or any standard?

Thanks!

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There is no constraint in REST that says you can only query by ID. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a set of query parameters to return a set of users that match those search criteria.

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Take a look at Google's GDATA Protocol. It's very RESTful and they have a very nice way of performing "complex" queries while still keeping a clean URI.

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/reference.html#Queries

Here is an example of what their clean query URIs

http://example.com/jo/-/Fritz/2006

instead of

http://example.com/jo?category=Fritz&category=2006

From Google:

This approach identifies a resource without using query parameters, and it produces cleaner URIs. We chose this approach for categories because we think that category queries will be the most common queries.

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As far as i'm concerned - restful stuff is valid for CRUD actions. You can implement separate search method/url and pass it as many parameters as you need. And if you still try to adhere to REST methodologies - you should use GET request type.

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Ryan Bates has a Railscast where he shows creating searches as a resource. The concept is still valid, even if you're not doing Rails.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/111-advanced-search-form

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I take the field lookups semantics of django as the guidelines for complex lookups. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#id4

Don't be sidetracked by the fact that it is defined as a lanuage-specific api, it is easy to translate to html query parameters.

An example would be http://example.com/Goods?category=fruit&size__lt=14

To get the result of select * from goods where category = 'fruit' and size < 14 in sql or /goods[@category='fruit' and @size < 14] in xpath, or whatever.