RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Including the version in the HTTP Accept header – media type versioning

The media type versioning approach adds the version information to the media content type. You can do this by introducing custom vendor media types that hold the version information along with the media type details. The version information in the Accept header takes the following form:

Accept: application/vnd.{app_name}.{version}+{response_type} 

The vnd part that you see in the Accept header is based on RFC 6838. The vnd keyword indicates the custom vendor-specific media types. More details are available at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6838.

When you use this approach for versioning APIs, the client has to specify the version in the HTTP Accept header, as shown in ...