API Design Patterns

15 Add and remove custom methods

This chapter covers

• How to manage many-to-many relationships implicitly
• The benefits and drawbacks of implicit rather than explicit association
• How to use custom methods to associate resources together
• Handling issues with data integrity of associated resources

In this chapter, we’ll explore an alternative pattern for modeling many-to-many relationships that relies on custom add and remove methods to associate (and disassociate) two resources. This pattern allows consumers to manage many-to-many relationships without introducing a third association resource as a necessary requirement.

15.1 Motivation

As we learned in chapter 14, sometimes we have a need to keep track of the relationships between resources, ...