Support for recognizing partial resources

[fosdev]

Since embedded resources can be partial, need a mechanism to indicate that. One option may be to add a full_href attribute to a link object. This would indicate that there is a full version and an the current is partial. E.g. self link to embedded partial and have like that can be used to get full representation.

[sheavalentine-mdsol]

Link Fragments can handle this.

http://server.com/foo/bar#baz/bing

[sheavalentine-mdsol]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier

[sheavalentine-mdsol]

@fosdev

Okay, so I think the answer is:

"""

When a resource is embedded and it is partial or incomplete, the service SHOULD supply a 'canonical' link relation specifying the preferred version. In this case the 'self' link should describe as much as possible the resource with the appropriate reference to the object.
For example, if a list resource has been filtered. That resource should provide a 'canonical' link to the resource in an unfiltered state, and the 'self' link should include the parameters which filtered it if they are available.
If the resource is shown with only sub elements shown, fragment identifiers SHOULD be provided in the 'self' link as per http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986
"""

This strikes me as belonging in Best Practices as opposed to the Spec Proper.

[fosrias]

Well, that would imply the only way to control getting a partial resource
is through using fragments. A common pattern for negotiating a lighter
version of a resource is using say a fields query parameter. I don't like
the idea of introspecting a self link to decide which query parameters to
strip and just adding a fragment like #partial does not cover it because if
you do remove the fragment, the URI with those query parameters would still
return the partial resource.

So, if we introspect for fragments and strip the fragment, that could be
one way of doing it, but not completely sure this is the best way. Thoughts
w/r to my sample fields scenario, etc.?

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 8:14 AM, Shea Valentine [email protected]
wrote:

Okay, so I think the answer is:

When a resource is embedded and it is partial or incomplete, the service
SHOULD supply a 'canonical' link relation specifying the preferred version.
In this case the 'self' link should describe as much as possible the
resource with the appropriate reference to the object.
For example, if a list resource has been filtered. That resource should
provide a 'canonical' link to the resource in an unfiltered state, and the
'self' link should include the parameters which filtered it if they are
available.
If the resource is shown with only sub elements shown, fragment
identifiers SHOULD be provided in the 'self' link as per
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

This strikes me as belonging in Best Practices as opposed to the Spec
Proper.

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