Use encoded object query param for GET request

Question

While designing the API with with the team a suggestion was forwarded in regards to some complex query parameters that we sent which need to be encoded as objects, arrays of objects, etc. Suppose I have a route GET /resource/ and I want to apply a set of filters directly in the query params. The object literal structure of this filter would be something like

filter: {
  field1: {
    contains: 'value',
    notin: ['value2', 'value3']
  },
  field2: {
    greaterThan: 10
  }
}

Encoding this in the url, via a query string parser such as the qs node module that express.js uses internally, would be cheap on the backend. However 1) The generated url is very hard to read, if a client wants to connect with the API he would need to use an encoding library and 2) I don't think I ever encountered the use of query params like this, it looks a little bit of overengineered and I'm not sure how used it is and if it is really safe.

The example above would yield query params such as:

GET /resource/?field1%5Bcontains%5D=value&field1%5Bnotin%5D%5B0%5D=value2&field1%5Bnotin%5D%5B1%5D=value3&field2%5BgreaterThan%5D=10

Does this practice of sending url query parameters that happen to be complex objects have some standards or best practices?

Jonny · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-05 06:52:05Z

1

We implemented a different solution for filtering, when the list of possible parameters was very long. We ended up doing it in two steps, posting the filter and returning a filter ID. The filter ID could then be used in the GET query.

We had trouble finding any best practices for this.

answered Jul 5, 2016 at 6:52

Jonny

1,21110 silver badges16 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Use encoded object query param for GET request

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related