API Design Patterns

5 Data types and defaults

This chapter covers

• What we mean by data types
• How a null value differs from one that’s missing entirely
• An exploration of the various primitive and collective data types
• How to handle serialization for various data types

When designing any API, we always have to think of the types of data we want to accept as input, understand, and potentially store. Sometimes this sounds pretty straightforward: a field called “name” might just be a string of characters. Hidden in this question though is a world of complexity. For example, how should the string of characters be represented as bytes (it turns out there are lots of options for this)? What happens if the name is omitted in an API call? Is that any different from providing ...