9 Custom methods

Often, there will be actions that we need to perform on our API resources that won't fit nicely into one of the standard methods. And while these behaviors could technically be handled by the resource's standard update method, the behavioral requirements of many of these operations would be quite out of place for a standard method, leading to a surprising, confusing, and overly complex interface. To address this, this pattern explores how to safely support these actions on resources in a web API while maintaining a simple, predictable, and functional API by using what we'll call "custom methods".

9.1           Motivation

9.1.1   Why not just standard methods?

9.2           Overview

9.3           Implementation

9.3.1   Side-effects

9.3.2   Resources versus collections

9.3.3   Stateless custom methods

9.3.4   Final API definition

9.4           Trade-offs

9.5           Exercises

9.6           Summary