Restricted Fields From Associated Models

[Adam]

You might request data from a model limiting fields like the following:

/owners/{id}/?fields=name,age

However, when you want to find dogs belonging to that owner, and restrict those fields as well, I'm curious to know what the best practice is? Something like this:

/owners/{id}/dogs?fields[owners]=name,age&fields[dogs]=name,breed

Would this be accepted, or am I likely to head down a path with many non-joyous tears at the end?

Cheers,

Adam

[Enrique Amodeo]

I'd do the following:

/dogs -> All the dogs
/dogs/{dogid} -> Only the dog {dogid}
/owners/{id}/dogs -> All the dogs owned by {id}
/owners/{id}/dogs?fields=name,age -> All the dogs owned by {id}, give
me only the specified fields

And so on. Each dog have a link, with rel="owner" in its
representation, that points to the URI of its owner. No need to repeat
fields. I don't need the necessity of fields[owners]=name,age in the
querystring. But perhaps I'm missing something.

Cheers,
Enrique Amodeo

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[Adam]

Thanks for replying Enrique.

Yeah, that's exactly the way I would have it as well, but what if the following should also return some data about the owner:

/owners/{id}/dogs

If it did, how would I specify restricted field criteria for both dogs and owners models?

Adam 

[Enrique Amodeo]

The trick is including the link to the owner in the dog
representation, this way there is no duplication of data. Assuming you
are using JSON, a dog could be represented like:
{
"name":"Scooby", "age":5, "race":"terrier".....
"links":[
{"rel":"self", "href":"http://server.com/dogs/33"},
{"rel":"owner", "href":"http://server.com/owners/01934"}
]
}
This way, if you want to know the data about the owner of the dog,
simple do a GET to the "owner" link.

Cheers,
Enrique Amodeo