I'm facing with a frequent restful api design issue, and i'm not sure about what to do. Actually i can't find any best practice/clue to know how to proceed...
for GET routes, for example, I have :api/v1/posts/1/ which returns a JSON representation of the resource with id: 1 :
{"id": 1,"title": "test","id_author": 1,"id_category": 2}with sub-objects such as author, category...
To present my data on the frontend (actually Nuxt3/VueJS with pinia stores), I need to show author name, avatar, and category label (and potentially others single sub-objects).I don't know if :
- I can/have to return author details + category details in the response to save 2 calls :
{"id": 1,"title": "test","id_author": 1,"author": {"id": 1,"firstname": "nico","lastname": "dupond" },"id_category": {"id": 2,"category": "news" }}- or if i have to make 2 more calls to get author details and category details (but i need to get the first api response to call the 2 others in async mode and wait for their returns to show data on the page)
- is it better to load all categories and users data at the start of the app and then get them in the built lists (acceptable because we have few users & categories)? But what about the data freshness / missing user in list (if i return sub-object my response will be bigger but consistent and up-to-date)?
- a mix of 1st and/or 2nd and/or 3rd solution ?
What do you think about these solutions? I think it depends on the context of the frontend, but i think that a good api does not have to depend on the frontend app because it will be potentially exposed to many others app... Is there a golden rule for restful APIs on that topic ?
thank you for your help :)