API Design Patterns

20 Anonymous writes

This chapter covers

• What we mean by anonymous data
• How to ingest data into an API without relying on creating resources
• How to address consistency concerns with ingested data

So far, writing any new data into an API has involved creating resources, complete with their unique identifiers and schemas. Unfortunately, as much as we might want this to be the one and only way to create data, it sometimes does not quite fit with the realities of the world. Indeed, there are scenarios where data needs to be written but not uniquely identified after the fact, such as entries in a log file or time series data points to be aggregated into statistics. In this pattern, we address this idea of writing data rather than creating resources ...