Sunday, April 28, 2024

API Design Patterns: Best Practices for Building Resilient APIs

api design patterns

The resource name in the response to this call must use the canonical nameof the resource, with actual parent collection identifiers instead of "-"for each parent collection. For example, the request above should return aresource with a name like shelves/shelf713/books/book8141, notshelves/-/books/book8141. An operation can provide information about its progress using theOperation.metadata field. An API should definea message for this metadata even if the initial implementation does notpopulate the metadata field.

Software Application Architecture

In our Crossfit API we will take a look at the creation endpoint and see what errors might arise and how we can handle them. At the end of this tip you'll find again the complete implementation for the other endpoints. Let's think about an endpoint where we need to receive JSON data from the client.

api design patterns

Best practices for API development

Returning all workouts is pretty simple and we don't have to do transformations because it's already a JSON file. It's also a good practice to name the service methods the same as the controller methods so that you have a connection between those. Let's create our service layer by implementing the next best practice. After setting it all up we can now dive into the real implementation of our API.

Developers with AI assistants need to follow the pair programming model

But as I said, in our example it's okay for me to only differentiate between the routes and let the router handle the rest. Nonetheless it's important to keep that in mind to have a clear structure when the API scales up and needs changes. The new directory /src/v1/routes will store all our routes for version 1. But for now let's add a simple index.js file to test things out. That's what we expose to the outside world and what can be consumed by other developers. But we also need to structure our project in order to differentiate between each version.

Microservices solutionsoften leverage polyglot programming and polyglot persistence, and DevOpspractices including decentralized continuous delivery and end-to-endmonitoring (Zimmermann (2017)). Creating robust APIs requires a firm grasp of essential patterns for REST API endpoints. The use of nouns in API endpoint signifies the existing resource being addressed, and collections should be named with plural nouns to indicate the possibility of multiple resources.

Common design patterns

I think requesting to receive all workouts would effectively be served from our cache. You can store this type of data inside your cache and serve it from there instead of going to the database every time to query the data. Using a data cache is also a great practice to improve the overall experience and performance of our API. Imagine we've got 2,000 workouts, 450 records, and 500 members stored in our DB. When calling our endpoint to get all workouts we don't want to send all 2,000 workouts at once.

If a client exceeds the limit, the API returns an error, preventing abuse of the system. API caching can be done on client-side, server-side, and distributed. On client-side caching, the client stores the response from the API in its own cache.

You can look up all the specifications to describe an endpoint in their great docs. There's one important thing I'd like to note here when it comes to caching. While it seems to solve a lot of problems for you, it also can bring some problems into your application. We were able to serve three times faster than in our previous request! It took the "regular" way from the database and filled our cache.

api design patterns

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Learn how the API design process can help teams deliver adaptable, testable, and well-documented APIs to consumers. If there isa common default behavior, then it shall be used when an enum value is notexplicitly specified. If there is no common default behavior, then the 0value should be rejected with error INVALID_ARGUMENT when used.

API design is the process of making intentional decisions about how an API will expose data and functionality to its consumers. A successful API design describes the API's endpoints, methods, and resources in a standardized specification format. Note that if output only fields are set in the request or included ina google.protobuf.FieldMask, the server must accept the request withouterror. The server must ignore the presence of output only fields and anyindication of it.

Nine Rules for Elegant Rust Library APIs by Carl M. Kadie - Towards Data Science

Nine Rules for Elegant Rust Library APIs by Carl M. Kadie.

Posted: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Pagination and filtering techniques are vital for API performance as they limit the data returned in a response, thereby reducing the server’s resource load. From cursor-based pagination to keyset pagination and Seek Paging, there are multiple techniques to allow efficient fetching of items in large datasets. Ideally, you can codify your organization’s approach once, rather than revisiting it each time you create an API. A style guide can keep your company on the same page with API design. In addition to being consistent between APIs, it’s even more important to maintain consistency within a single API. Often, when use cases are discovered after an API is built, engineers will create new endpoints to support these unearthed requirements.

Improve your API Design with 7 Guiding Principles - The New Stack

Improve your API Design with 7 Guiding Principles.

Posted: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 08:00:00 GMT [source]

In Restful APIs, multiple clients are connected to the same backend server. So when the internal representation of a server is changed, it should not affect API consumption at the client-side. In a loosely coupled design, APIs are independent, and modifications in one won't impact the operation of consumers. Within an API, the components get added, modified, or replaced.

For network APIs, idempotent API methods are highly preferred, because they canbe safely retried after network failures. However, some API methods cannoteasily be idempotent, such as creating a resource, and there is a need to avoidunnecessary duplication. For such use cases, the request message shouldcontain a unique ID, like a UUID, which the server will use to detectduplication and make sure the request is only processed once. The performance of your RESTful API can be significantly enhanced through the efficient handling of request body and response messages. Acting as a gatekeeper, rate limiting protects your API resources.

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