How to model a CANCEL action in a RESTful way?

rest api httpverbs http-patch
Karthik Balasubramanian picture Karthik Balasubramanian · Mar 1, 2017 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

We are currently in the process of wrangling smaller services from our monoliths. Our domain is very similar to a ticketing system. We have decided to start with the cancellation process of the domain.

Our cancel service has as simple endpoint "Cancel" which takes in the id of the ticket. Internally, we retrieve the id, perform some operations related to cancel on it and update the state of the entity in the store. From the store's perspective the only difference between a cancelled ticket and a live ticket are a few properties.

From what I have read, PATCH seems to be the correct verb to be used in this case, as am updating only a simple property in the resource.

PATCH /api/tickets/{id}
Payload {isCancelled: true}

But isCancelled is not an actual property in the entity. Is it fair to send properties in the payload that are not part of the entity or should I think of some other form of modeling this request? I would not want to send the entire entity as part of the payload, since it is large.

I have considered creating a new resource CancelledTickets, but in our domain we would never have the need to a GET on cancelled tickets. Hence stayed away from having to create a new resource.

Answer

Israfel picture Israfel · Aug 30, 2017

Exposing the GET interface of a resource is not compulsory.

For example, use

PUT /api/tickets/{id}/actions/cancel

to submit the cancellation request. I choose PUT since there would be no more than one cancellation request in effect.

Hope it be helpful.

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