Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

Entity endpoints

If service clients want to interact with entities, such as investors, and their stocks without needing them to manage a compound identifier for both investor and stock, we need a pattern called entity endpoint. Entity endpoints suggest exposing each entity as individual lightweight endpoints of the service they reside in, so the service consumers get the global addressability of service entities:

The preceding screenshot illustrates how a service consumer can access individual entity endpoints instead of service endpoints. The entity endpoints expose reusable enterprise resources, so service consumers can reuse and share the ...