Autocomplete - POST or GET?

[Alejandro Mantecón Guillén]

Hello all,

This is my first post in this group :)  I was wondering what the best practice would be for an auto-complete response from an API. It is one of those weird cases in which the response doesn't really involve a resource. 

So for example, if we were talking about names, the client-side would send a string (such as "jon") and wold receive an array of suggestions ("Jonatan, Jonas, Jones...").

Would it be better to have it as a GET request with the parameter on the URL?  URL?str=jon

OR

Would a POST/PUT be more appropriate with the string on the payload? {"str": "jon"}

Thanks for your help!

[Mike Kelly]

The client's retrieving a list of stuff from the server - which means
it's a safe, idempotent request. You should just use GET, as this will
allow you to use web caching. Not sure why don't consider it a
resource.

Cheers,
M

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Mike

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[Kris Kleva]

I used GETs.  However, be sure to use heavy caching (browser, cdn, app server, etc) and even consider holding keyword lists in application server memory space verses reading from disk.  IMHO, a response from an autocomplete should be no more than 200 ms before it begins annoying the end user so do what ever you can do to make it fast while having a large number of possible keywords.

[Daniel Roop]

+1 GET

The RESTFul WEb Services Cookbook refers to this as a Compute/Processing Function (Recipe 2.5).