Designing a REST API in Spring Boot

Question

I need to design a REST api ListMessages service (there are 4 fields in title, url, content and sender) that service should support two response versions within the same endpoint. The caller is able to define which response version he can handle.

Messages returned by the first version should contain only title, content and sender fields. The first version must not accept any other parameters than the version parameter.
Messages returned by the second version should return all 4 fields.The second version also takes a parameter which defines the format in which the response is returned (supported formats could be e.g. JSON and XML).

@RequestMapping(value ="/listMessages" , produces = {MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML_VALUE})
@ResponseBody
public List<?> getAllMessages(@RequestParam Map<String,String> allParams){
    
    if(allParams.get("version").equalsIgnoreCase("v1" ) && allParams.size()==1)
        return listMessagesService.getAllMessages();
    
    else if (allParams.get("version").equalsIgnoreCase("v2") && allParams.size()>1)
        return listMessagesService.getAllMessagesV2("v2");
    
        
        return null;
}

This is my code. Is the code acceptable and is it OK to design API like this?

This can simplify, as most of the concerns will be handled by Spring [Create two method for same url pattern]( https://stackoverflow.com/a/15853217/7878602) — ImtiazeA, Sep 08 '20 at 04:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 08 '20 at 04:52

1

you need to version your API . There are many ways to do it.

URI versioning

ex: http://myapi/v1/users http://myapi/v2/users
Media Type versioning Example Accept: application/vnd.myapi.v1+json

answered Sep 08 '20 at 04:52

Achalveer

61
3

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 08 '20 at 05:17

Before provide solution i have few question based on your answer will update design

Q. Are you getting any identifier which help you to identify return two fields in response or all four fields ?

Assumption : You have identifier in request json to identify clients

Use @JsonIgnore properties into your response POJO

Jackson serialization: ignore empty values (or null)

So when you return response for '

Coutomer A set only 2 fields and other or null Coutomer B set All 4 fields

@JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL) will hide all null values into your response Json

Designing a REST API in Spring Boot

2 Answers2