I am an API developer in my company. We are developing a social network. We are using a friendship system. We are using API-oriented system. The api I will be writing will be used by every platform we are developing.
I classically have a User resource and I am using a friendships table to track friendships:
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| id | int(10) unsigned | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| sourceId | int(11) | NO | MUL | NULL | |
| targetId | int(11) | NO | | NULL | |
| status | tinyint(1) | NO | | 0 | |
| seen | tinyint(1) | NO | | 0 | |
| createdAt | timestamp | NO | | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| updatedAt | timestamp | NO | | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| deletedAt | timestamp | YES | | NULL | |
+-----------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
And now, I am trying to think about how I should implement the necessary URIs. But I couldn't get the idea of how I should implement it exactly. And I could only came up with this idea, and couldn't get it forward:
Let's say I have 2 users one with the username of john and the other with the username of jane.
jane wants to add john as a friend, and when to do so, she sends a POST request:
POST /users/john/friendships
john saw this, and want to deny or confirm it, to do so, I came up with 2 different ideas; 1st one is:
PUT /users/jane/friendships?action=(deny|confirm)
or 2nd one is:
PUT /users/jane/friendships/<friendshipId>?action=(deny|confirm)
Conventionally, the 2nd one seems more appropriate to me but then I think that I can just do
PUT /friendships/<friendshipId>?action=(deny|confirm)
So, I am stuck in here. All I think of this is these examples. I don't think these are the right ones.
John could add Jane as a friend (including a request body with the relevant information):
POST /users/john/friends
...or, John could update some information about his friendship with Jane (again, with the request body)
PUT /users/john/friends/jane
...or, John could 'unfriend' Jane.
DELETE /users/john/friends/jane