README

This is a brief introduction to how the rest server works. See the services_oop module to find out more about how you easily can expose functionality in a resource-oriented way.

All this depends on the functionality added by the oauth-rest branch of services.

Controllers

Tabulation of the controller mapping for the REST server. Requests gets mapped to different controllers based on the HTTP method used and the number of parts in the path.

Count refers to the number of path parts that comes after the path that identifies the resource type. The request for /services/rest/node/123 would have the count 1, as /services/rest/node identifies the resource.

X = CRUD
A = Action
T = Targeted action
R = Relationship request

COUNT |0|1|2|3|4|N|
-------------------
GET   |X|X|R|R|R|R|
-------------------
POST  |X|A|T|T|T|T|
-------------------
PUT   | |X| | | | |
-------------------
DELETE| |X| | | | |
-------------------

CRUD

The basis of the REST server.

Create:   POST /services/rest/node + body data
Retrieve: GET /services/rest/node/123
Update:   PUT /services/rest/node/123 + body data
Delete:   DELETE /services/rest/node/123

And last but least, the little bastard sibling to Retrieve that didn't get it's place in the acronym:

Index:    GET /services/rest/node

In the REST server the index often doubles as a search function. The comment resource allows queries like the following for checking for new comments on a node (where 123456 is the timestamp for the last check and 123600 is now):

New comments: GET /services/comment?nid=123&timestamp=123456:
Comments in the last hour: GET /services/comment?timestamp=120000:123600

Actions

Actions are performed directly on the resource type, not a individual resource. The following example is hypothetical (but plausible). Say that you want to expose a API for the apachesolr module. One of the things that could be exposed is the functionality to reindex the whole site.

Publish:  POST /services/rest/apachesolr/reindex

Targeted actions

Targeted actions acts on a individual resource. A good, but again - hypothetical, example would be the publishing and unpublishing of nodes.

Publish:  POST /services/rest/node/123/publish

Relationships

Relationship requests are convenience methods (sugar) to get something thats related to a individual resource. A real example would be the relationship that the comment_resource module adds to the node resource:

Get comments: GET /services/rest/node/123/comments

This more or less duplicates the functionality of the comment index:

Get comments: GET /services/rest/comments?nid=123