Thus far, most of the API design patterns we’ve looked at have focused on one or two resources at a time. In this section, we expand beyond this narrow focus and look at design patterns aimed at dealing with larger collections of resources.
In chapters 17 and 23, we’ll explore how to copy, move, import, and export resources across collections, and all of the headaches that come with this functionality. In chapter 18, we’ll learn how to apply the set of standard methods to handle chunks of resources by operating on batches rather than one resource at a time. And while we can apply this idea to the standard delete method, we’ll take things a step further in chapter 19 by looking at how to delete many resources at once by applying a filter across a collection (which we’ll learn more about in chapter 22) rather than by knowing each resource’s unique identifier.