Using Range header for partial lookup/paging

[David Waite]

According to RFC 7233, the Range header units are extensible, although the only official values are "bytes" and "none".

I was wondering if anyone has made a range unit of say "objects", where a resource representing a sequence of data objects will return a subset of those objects when the range header is given.

For example, a /events endpoint which would return all 1,000 entries in a JSON array on a normal GET would return just the ten most recent given a header of

Range: objects=-10

which would return a JSON array of just those entries, e.g.

206 Partial Content HTTP/1.1

Content-Range: objects 990-999/1000

Has anyone seen API which do such a thing?

-David Waite

[Anderson Muller]

We implemented this pattern for paging. It was not difficult and clients accepted it well.

See also this blog post: http://otac0n.com/blog/2012/11/21/range-header-i-choose-you.html

[Anderson Muller]

Also: https://begriffs.com/posts/2014-03-06-beyond-http-header-links.html