I have been able so far to create a new civi Mailing object and populate it, but confusingly I can't see a parameter in that to specify the mail destination group.
For context, I am dealing with Civi using pure REST api from a remote server. I have a solution to getting a custom template onto the server; the new problem is setting a schedule and delivery group, and initiating the send. I am using the python-civicrm library from github as the intermediary on the client.
I presume send happens as a result of setting the schedule -- i.e. I don't need an API call to say 'send mailing'? Is setting 'sheduled date' == 'now' safe or should I set a date of 'now + 1min' or similar?
So that leaves setting the delivery group. We already have groups defined in the DB, and I want to specify the group by name (and preferably be able to verify in advance that a group name is a valid destination, perhaps by doing a group name -> id lookup).
I think there might be a parameter to Mailing create 'groups' which can have keys 'include' and 'exclude'; at least, that's what the web form seems to do. However it's not mentioned in the REST api implementation.
Can anyone offer pointers?
To confirm, the problem was that (a) I needed to use groups[include]=array(ids) as mentioned by samuelsov, but also (b) I needed to use the json={...} form of request through REST, because the HTTP params syntax doesn't support nested data.