April 2018
Intermediate to advanced
178 pages
3h 51m
English
So far, the catalog service supports only the JSON format, and thus works only with the media type application/json. Let's assume our service has to offer data in different formats, for example, both JSON and XML. Then, the consumer needs to explicitly define the data format they need. The best way to carry out content negotiation in REST has been a very debatable subject for a long time.
In his famous discussion on implementing content negotiation correctly, Roy Fielding states the following:
However, that leaves a gap on how to expose the same resource in a different data format, so Roy continues with the following: