If a REST API endpoint gets all, then filters are easy. Lack of a filter means "get all results".
GET /persons - gets all persons
GET /persons?name=john - gets all persons with name of "john"
But if there is a default, then I need some way to explicitly not set the default filter. Continuing the above example, if each person has a state, "approved" or "pending", and if my system is set such that if I do not explicitly specify a state, it will return all "approved":
GET /persons - gets all approved persons, because defaults to state=approved
GET /persons?state=approved - same thing, gets all approved persons
GET /persons?state=pending - gets all pending persons
How do I get all persons? What if there are 10 possible states? Or 100?
I can think of a few ways:
GET /persons?state=any - but then I can never use the actual state anyGET /persons?state=* - would work, but feels strange? Or is it?GET /persons?state= - some URL parsing libraries would complain about a blank query parameter, and does this not imply "state is empty" as opposed to "state is anything"?How do I say in my GET, "override the default for the state to be anything"?
I don't think there is one answer to this question. As long as you document that the default state is approved well I don't think it matter to the clients if you pass any, * etc. All of your proposals are fine except the last one. I don't think that is a good one.
If I was designing the API I would use all and keep this as a standard. I would also recommend to use paging for all endpoints that returns list of elements. I use offset and limit as paging query parameters. In my API I return 20 elements as default if the client haven't specified another paging criteria.