I have a portfolio where I display my work (mostly backend API stuff with minimal UI to interact with) and am currently documenting the APIs. What I have is a page per project along with the documentation that belongs to it. In my APIs, I use a "base" endpoint named after the resource it works with (/todos
, /posts
,…). GET /todos
would return a list of every todos
from the DB, pretty standard stuff. I also use a "base" /me
endpoint to be able to return every kind of resource of the current logged in user (that can be posts
, todos
,… ex: GET /me/todos
would return every todos
of the current user).
Because I have a page per project / documentation, should I list and document every /me
endpoints in a separate page (for example, in my "Profile" page), or should I put them in their respective projects page ? Ex : In my "Todos" project page, I would document every /todos
endpoint but also GET /me/todos
and so on for every project.
I know this might sound like a stupid question, but it bugs me a little to mix the "base" endpoint of a project (ex: /todos
) with this GET /me/todos
endpoint (because then the /todos
endpoint doesn't seem to be the "base" one anymore). But at the same time, I feel like having this GET /me/todos
documented in the "Todos" project page would facilitate navigating and reading the docs.
Could someone point me in the right direction please?
If you develop a REST API, there is the uniform interface constraint, which includes the HATEOAS constraint, which says, that the API must serve hyperlinks and the client must rely on hyperlink metadata instead of URI structure. Something like ReadMyTodos
instead of GET /me/todos
. Worst case solution is adding a map like {"ReadMyTodos": ["GET", "/me/todos"]}
to translate for the clients, but you won't get the same experience, because the client won't know what allowed on which page, so you need a map for that too {"/me": ["ReadMyTodos", "ReadMyPosts"]}
. And this works only if every user has the same role in your API and every resource supports the same operation, the supported operation does not depend on the resource state, which is unlikely. Normally your API should not give error messages, because you want to update a post that was closed by an admin. This is because the hyperlink for updating the post must not show up on the hyperlink list at all. If you don't return hyperlinks, then the clients would try if the operation is available and they will rely on trial and error for not reason.
If you don't want to use the upper approach and so we are not talking about a REST API, then the GET /todos
and the GET /me/todos
return a different list for the same user, then you must document them separately. This does not necessarily mean that they need to be on separate documentation pages. You can use sections/divisions to separate them on a single page if they are interrelated. E.g. you can have links related to Todo
s and you document them on a single page and usually have a list of links on the top of the page and local anchors with hashtags for sections something like /docs/Todo#ReadMyTodos
.