When building HTTP based applications we are limited to a small set of HTTP methods in order to achieve the goals of our application. Once our needs go beyond simple CRUD style manipulation of resource representations, we need to be a little more creative in the way we manipulate resources in order to achieve more complex goals.
The following patterns are based on scenarios that I myself have used in production applications, or I have seen others implement. These patterns are language agnostic, domain agnostic and to my knowledge, exist within the limitations of the REST constraints.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Alias | A resource designed to provide a logical identifier but without being responsible for incurring the costs of transferring the representation bytes. |
| Action | Coming soon A processing resource used to convey a client's intent to invoke some kind of unsafe action on a secondary resource. |
| Bouncer | A resource designed to accept a request body containing complex query parameters and redirect to a new location to enable the results of complex and expensive queries to be cached. |
| Builder | Coming soon: A builder resource is much like a factory resource in that it is used to create another resource, however, a builder is a transient resource that enables idempotent creation and allows the client to specify values that cannot change over the lifetime of the created resource. |
| Bucket | A resource used to indicate the status of a "child" resource. |
| Discovery | This type of resource is used to provide a client with the information it needs to be able to access other resources. |
| Factory | A factory resource is one that is used to create another resource. |
| Miniput | A resource designed to enable doing a partial updates to another resource. |
| Progress | A progress resource is usually a temporary resource that is created automatically by the server to provide status on some long running process that has been initiated by a client. |
| Sandbox | Coming soon: A processing resource that is paired with a regular resource to enable making "whatif" style updates and seeing what the results would have been if applied against the regular resource. |
| Toggle | Coming soon: A resource that has two distinct states and can easily be switched between those states. |
| Whackamole | A type of resource that when deleted, re-appears as a different resource. |
| Window | Coming soon: A resource that provides access to a subset of a larger set of information through the use of parameters that filter, project and zoom information from the complete set. |