After having read a lot of material on REST versioning, I am thinking of versioning the calls instead of the API. For example:
http://api.mydomain.com/callfoo/v2.0/param1/param2/param3
http://api.mydomain.com/verifyfoo/v1.0/param1/param2
instead of first having
http://api.mydomain.com/v1.0/callfoo/param1/param2
http://api.mydomain.com/v1.0/verifyfoo/param1/param2
then going to
http://api.mydomain.com/v2.0/callfoo/param1/param2/param3
http://api.mydomain.com/v2.0/verifyfoo/param1/param2
The advantage I see are:
When the calls change, I do not have to rewrite my entire client - only the parts that are affected by the changed calls.
Those parts of the client that work can continue as is (we have a lot of testing hours invested to ensure both the client and the server sides are stable.)
I can use permanent or non-permanent redirects for calls that have changed.
Backward compatibility would be a breeze as I can leave older call versions as is.
Am I missing something? Please advise.
Require an HTTP header.
Version: 1
The Version header is provisionally registered in RFC 4229 and there some legitimate reasons to avoid using an X- prefix or a usage-specific URI. A more typical header was proposed by yfeldblum at https://stackoverflow.com/a/2028664:
X-API-Version: 1
In either case, if the header is missing or doesn't match what the server can deliver, send a 412 Precondition Failed response code along with the reason for the failure. This requires clients to specify the version they support every single time but enforces consistent responses between client and server. (Optionally supporting a ?version= query parameter would give clients an extra bit of flexibility.)
This approach is simple, easy to implement and standards-compliant.
Alternatives
I'm aware that some very smart, well-intentioned people have suggested URL versioning and content negotiation. Both have significant problems in certain cases and in the form that they're usually proposed.
URL Versioning
Endpoint/service URL versioning works if you control all servers and clients. Otherwise, you'll need to handle newer clients falling back to older servers, which you'll end up doing with custom HTTP headers because system administrators of server software deployed on heterogeneous servers outside of your control can do all sorts of things to screw up the URLs you think will be easy to parse if you use something like 302 Moved Temporarily.
Content Negotiation
Content negotiation via the Accept header works if you are deeply concerned about following the HTTP standard but also want to ignore what the HTTP/1.1 standard documents actually say. The proposed MIME Type you tend to see is something of the form application/vnd.example.v1+json. There are a few problems:
There are cases where the vendor extensions are actually appropriate, of course, but slightly different communication behaviors between client and server doesn't really fit the definition of a new 'media type'. Also, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) reads, "Media-type values are registered with the Internet Assigned Number Authority. The media type registration process is outlined in RFC 1590. Use of non-registered media types is discouraged." I don't want to see a separate media type for every version of every software product that has a REST API.
Any subtype ranges (e.g., application/*) don't make sense. For REST APIs that return structured data to clients for processing and formatting, what good is accepting */* ?
The Accept header takes some effort to parse correctly. There's both an implied and explicit precedence that should be followed to minimize the back-and-forth required to actually do content negotiation correctly. If you're concerned about implementing this standard correctly, this is important to get right.
RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) describes the behavior for any client that does not include an Accept header: "If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the client accepts all media types." So, for clients you don't write yourself (where you have the least control), the most correct thing to do would be to respond to requests using the newest, most prone-to-breaking-old-versions version that the server knows about. In other words, you could have not implemented versioning at all and those clients would still be breaking in exactly the same way.
Edited, 2014:
I've read a lot of the other answers and everyone's thoughtful comments; I hope I can improve on this with the benefit of a couple of years of feedback:
Don't use an 'X-' prefix. I think Accept-Version is probably more meaningful in 2014, and there are some valid concerns about the semantics of re-using Version raised in the comments. There's overlap with defined headers like Content-Version and the relative opaqueness of the URI for sure, and I try to be careful about confusing the two with variations on content negotiation, which the Version header effectively is. The third 'version' of the URL https://example.com/api/212315c2-668d-11e4-80c7-20c9d048772b is wholly different than the 'second', regardless of whether it contains data or a document.
Regarding what I said above about URL versioning (endpoints like https://example.com/v1/users, for instance) the converse probably holds more truth: if you control all servers and clients, URL/URI versioning is probably what you want. For a large-scale service that could publish a single service URL, I would go with a different endpoint for every version, like most do. My particular take is heavily influenced by the fact that the implementation as described above is most commonly deployed on lots of different servers by lots of different organizations, and, perhaps most importantly, on servers I don't control. I always want a canonical service URL, and if a site is still running the v3 version of the API, I definitely don't want a request to https://example.com/v4/ to come back with their web server's 404 Not Found page (or even worse, 200 OK that returns their homepage as 500k of HTML over cellular data back to an iPhone app.)
If you want very simple /client/ implementations (and wider adoption), it's very hard to argue that requiring a custom header in the HTTP request is as simple for client authors as GET-ting a vanilla URL. (Although authentication often requires your token or credentials to be passed in the headers, anyway. Using Version or Accept-Version as a secret handshake along with an actual secret handshake fits pretty well.)
Content negotiation using the Accept header is good for getting different MIME types for the same content (e.g., XML vs. JSON vs. Adobe PDF), but not defined for versions of those things (Dublin Core 1.1 vs. JSONP vs. PDF/A). If you want to support the Accept header because it's important to respect industry standards, then you won't want a made-up MIME Type interfering with the media type negotiation you might need to use in your requests. A bespoke API version header is guaranteed not to interfere with the heavily-used, oft-cited Accept, whereas conflating them into the same usage will just be confusing for both server and client. That said, namespacing what you expect into a named profile per 2013's RFC6906 is preferable to a separate header for lots of reasons. This is pretty clever, and I think people should seriously consider this approach.
Adding a header for every request is one particular downside to working within a stateless protocol.
Malicious proxy servers can do almost anything to destroy HTTP requests and responses. They shouldn't, and while I don't talk about the Cache-Control or Vary headers in this context, all service creators should carefully consider how their content is consumed in lots of different environments.
This is a matter of opinion; here's mine, along with the motivation behind the opinion.
include the version in the URL.
For those who say, it belongs in the HTTP header, I say: maybe. But putting in the URL is the accepted way to do it according to the early leaders in the field. (Google, yahoo, twitter, and more). This is what developers expect and doing what developers expect, in other words acting in accordance with the principle of least astonishment, is probably a good idea. It absolutely does not make it "harder for clients to upgrade". If the change in URL somehow represents an obstacle to the developer of a consuming application, as suggested in a different answer here, that developer needs to be fired.
Skip the minor version
There are plenty of integers. You're not gonna run out. You don't need the decimal in there. Any change from 1.0 to 1.1 of your API shouldn't break existing clients anyway. So just use the natural numbers. If you like to use separation to imply larger changes, you can start at v100 and do v200 and so on, but even there I think YAGNI and it's overkill.
Put the version leftmost in the URI
Presumably there are going to be multiple resources in your model. They all need to be versioned in synchrony. You can't have people using v1 of resource X, and v2 of resource Y. It's going to break something. If you try to support that it will create a maintenance nightmare as you add versions, and there's no value add for the developer anyway. So, http://api.mydomain.com/v1/Resource/12345 , where Resource is the type of resource, and 12345 gets replaced by the resource id.
You didn't ask, but...
Omit verbs from your URL path
REST is resource oriented. You have things like "CallFoo" in your URL path, which looks suspiciously like a verb, and unlike a noun. This is wrong. Use the Force, Luke. Use the verbs that are part of REST: GET PUT POST DELETE and so on. If you want to get the verification on a resource, then do GET http://domain/v1/Foo/12345/verification. If you want to update it, do POST /v1/Foo/12345.
Put optional params as a query param or payload
The optional params should not be in the URL path (before the first question mark) unless you are suggesting that those optional params constitute a self-standing resource. So, POST /v1/Foo/12345?action=partialUpdate¶m1=123¶m2=abc.
Don't do either of those things, because they push the version into the URI structure, and that's going to have downsides for your client applications. It will make it harder for them to upgrade to take advantage of new features in your application.
Instead, you should version your media types, not your URIs. This will give you maximum flexibility and evolutionary ability. For more information, see this answer I gave to another question.
I like using the profile media type parameter:
application/json; profile="http://www.myapp.com/schema/entity/v1"
More Info:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6906
http://buzzword.org.uk/2009/draft-inkster-profile-parameter-00.html
It depends on what you call versions in your API, if you call versions to different representations (xml, json, etc) of the entities then you should use the accept headers or a custom header. That is the way http is designed for working with representations. It is RESTful because if I call the same resource at the same time but requesting different representations, the returned entities will have exactly the same information and property structure but with different format, this kind of versioning is cosmetic.
In the other hand if you understand 'versions' as changes in entity structure, for example adding a field 'age' to the 'user' entity. Then you should approach this from a resource perspective which is in my opinion the RESTful approach. As described by Roy Fielding in his disseration ...a REST resource is a mapping from an identifier to a set of entities... Therefore makes sense that when changing the structure of an entity you need to have a proper resource that points to that version. This kind of versioning is structural.
I made a similar comment in: http://codebetter.com/howarddierking/2012/11/09/versioning-restful-services/
When working with url versioning the version should come later and not earlier in the url:
GET/DELETE/PUT onlinemall.com/grocery-store/customer/v1/{id}
POST onlinemall.com/grocery-store/customer/v1
Another way of doing that in a cleaner way but which could be problematic when implementing:
GET/DELETE/PUT onlinemall.com/grocery-store/customer.v1/{id}
POST onlinemall.com/grocery-store/customer.v1
Doing it this way allows the client to request specifically the resource they want which maps to the entity they need. Without having to mess with headers and custom media types which is really problematic when implementing in a production environment.
Also having the url late in the url allows the clients to have more granularity when choosing specifically the resources they want, even at method level.
But the most important thing from a developer perspective, you don't need to maintain the whole mappings (paths) for every version to all the resources and methods. Which is very valuable when you have lot of sub-resources (embedded resources).
From an implementation perspective having it at the level of resource is really easy to implement, for example if using Jersey/JAX-RS:
#Path("/customer")
public class CustomerResource {
...
#GET
#Path("/v{version}/{id}")
public IDto getCustomer(#PathParam("version") String version, #PathParam("id") String id) {
return locateVersion(version, customerService.findCustomer(id));
}
...
#POST
#Path("/v1")
#Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public IDto insertCustomerV1(CustomerV1Dto customer) {
return customerService.createCustomer(customer);
}
#POST
#Path("/v2")
#Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public IDto insertCustomerV2(CustomerV2Dto customer) {
return customerService.createCustomer(customer);
}
...
}
IDto is just an interface for returning a polymorphic object, CustomerV1 and CustomerV2 implement that interface.
Facebook does verisoning in the url. I feel url versioning is cleaner and easier to maintain as well in the real world.
.Net makes it super easy to do versioning this way:
[HttpPost]
[Route("{version}/someCall/{id}")]
public HttpResponseMessage someCall(string version, int id))
I apologize if some of my terminology is off, I'm still trying to learn:
I'm using the Dropwizard framework and I have a resource class with all my various POST/GET/etc methods. They all work fine when hit from Postman, browsers, etc. If I try something that has no matching path in the resource class I get an exception with HTTP status 405 - method not allowed.
Is there a way to default to some other method where I can display troubleshooting help -- like a list of what the available APIs are or a link to some documentation? Sort of like a try catch type of logic. Not sure what the options are or if there is a best way to do this.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
I don't think you might want to do that. REST over HTTP is driven "mostly" by the HTTP method and the end-point the same will act upon it.
In any stack, try to avoid that since you have specific actions for specific resources...anything else should be treated as something the server didn't understand, in the same way the HTTP protocol would behave.
Being said that, just apply a wildcard, usually * to one of the methods as a fallback action. That should work on Jersey and Spring Boot (MVC) as well.
I'm working on a servlet to perform some logic specific to a resourceType in sling and set information to the request to be accessible via the jsp then handing off the request to the jsp similarly to the first solution provided in this answer.
Here's some example code to represent my situation:
#SlingServlet(
resourceTypes="myapp/components/mycomponent",
methods="GET",
extensions={"html"}
)
...
#Reference
private ServletResolver serlvetResolver;
protected void doGet(....) {
setPropertiesToRequest();
Servlet servlet = servletResolver.resolveServlet(resource, "....jsp");
servlet.service(slingRequest, slingResponse);
clearPropertiesFromRequest();
}
Because of this, I've noticed that I've lost sling's selector handling (I've had to roll my own simpler version to determine which jsp to render. Full featured sling selector handling is described in more detail here). I wanted to reach out to the stack overflow community and ask what else I may be missing out on by depriving the default get handler of the request. I've scanned through the source code but I think there may be more going on.
Secondly, I'd be interested in thoughts on how and where this approach may impact performance of the request resolution.
Thanks, Thomas
Processing the business logic in Java and delegating to scripts for rendering sounds like a job for the recently released Sling Models. Using that should remove the need to implement your own handling of selectors, as those won't affect the model selection, only the rendering scripts.
Not sure what you are trying to achieve here, but the main problem seems to me that your SlingServlet handles the html extension and by itself does not have selectors to filter a bit more. Thus it of course intercepts all the requests to your component. Then you have to take care of the selectors again to be able to choose the correct JSP.
The question is, why do you use a SlingServlet for it when you anyway do the rendering by JSP?
Can't you implement your logic in the JSP or better in a bean referenced in the JSP?
In our company we use our custom tag that takes care of this, but there are public frameworks available from other Adobe Partner:
https://github.com/Cognifide/Slice
http://neba.io/index.html
We are facing problems with XSS attacks to our application. We are preventing this by using normal filters for GET requests.
We are using RESTEasy REST webservice calls to our application. Our filter not filtering the data inside form GET/POST/DELETE/PUT requests.
The basic requirment is we need to check the XSS attacks on all the fields,headers and cookies as well.
How do we get the posted values before invoking the method. Just like filters what we did for normal requests.
I am using resteasy2.0 version for our app.
Is there anyway to update the request wrapper before going to invoke rest method.
Please give us some suggestions on this. Thanks in advance.
Thanks,
Govind.
Resteasy 2.0 allows you to use Interceptors on JAX-RS invocations and route them through listener-like objects.
You can declare an interceptor to check your request body and/or header before a JAX-RS resource method is invoked.
You can give a look to the docs here : Resteasy Interceptors Documentation
An example on how use it : Resteasy Interceptors Example
If I have understood it properly you want a filter like in Servlet so that you can handle each request before it hit the REST function. It will also keep your implementation common for all REST alls. Correct me if I am wrong.
One simple solution coming in my mind though I never worked with resteasy2.0.
You can write a common function and call that function from your REST methods first line. Check for scripting elements in that function and if found throw error or do something else.
This must have been answered previously, but my Google powers are off today and I have been struggling with this for a bit. We are migrating from an old PHP base to a Jersey-based JVM stack, which will ultimately provide a JSON-based RESTful API that can be consumed from many applications. Things have been really good so far and we love the easy POJO-to-JSON conversion. However, we are dealing with difficulties in Cross-Domain JSON requests. We essentially have all of our responses returning JSON (using #Produces("application/json") and the com.sun.jersey.api.json.POJOMappingFeature set to true) but for JSONP support we need to change our methods to return an instance of JSONWithPadding. This of course also requires us to add a #QueryParam("callback") parameter to each method, which will essentially duplicate our efforts, causing two methods to be needed to respond with the same data depending on whether or not there is a callback parameter in the request. Obviously, this is not what we want.
So we essentially have tried a couple different options. Being relatively new to Jersey, I am sure this problem has been solved. I read from a few places that I could write a request filter or I could extend the JSON Provider. My ideal solution is to have no impact on our data or logic layers and instead have some code that says "if there is a call back parameter, surround the JSON with the callback, otherwise just return the JSON". A solution was found here:
http://jersey.576304.n2.nabble.com/JsonP-without-using-JSONWithPadding-td7015082.html
However, that solution extends the Jackson JSON object, not the default JSON provider.
What are the best practices? If I am on the right track, what is class for the default JSON filter that I can extend? Is there any additional configuration needed? Am I completely off track?
If all your resource methods return JSONWithPadding object, then Jersey automatically figures out if it should return JSON (i.e. just the object wrapped by it) or the callback as well based on the requested media type - i.e. if the media type requested by the client is any of application/javascript, application/x-javascript, text/ecmascript, application/ecmascript or text/jscript, then Jersey returns the object wrapped by the callback. If the requested media type is application/json, Jersey returns the JSON object (i.e. does not wrap it with the callback). So, one way to make this work is to make your resource method produce all the above media types (including application/json), always return JSONWithPadding and let Jersey figure out what to do.
If this does not work for you, let us know why it does not cover your use case (at users at jersey.java.net). Anyway, in that case you can use ContainerRequest/ResponseFilters. In the request filter you can modify the request headers any way you want (e.g. adjust the accept header) to ensure it matches the right resource method. Then in the response filter you can wrap the response entity using the JSONWithPadding depending on whether the callback query param is available and adjust the content type header.
So what I ultimately ended up doing (before Martin's great response came in) was creating a Filter and a ResponseWrapper that intercepted the output. The basis for the code is at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31017_01/web.1013/b28959/filters.htm
Essentially, the filter checks to see if the callback parameter exists. If it does, it prepends the callback to the outputted JSON and appends the ) at the end. This works great for us in our testing, although it has not been hardened yet. While I would have loved for Jersey to be able to handle it automatically, I could not get it to work with jQuery correctly (probably something on my side, not a problem with Jersey). We have pre-existing jQuery calls and we are changing the URLs to look at the new Jersey Server and we really didn't want to go into each $.ajax call to change any headers or content types in the calls if we didn't have to.
Aside from the small issue, Jersey has been great to work with!