RESTful: How to perform different actions on the same url?
As far as I know, according to RESTful guidelines, every url should represent a single resource or a group of resources, and actions should be put as arguments.
Assume we have a group of resources named 'users', and I want to register one more user,
so the api could be:
POST /users HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
username=<username>&password=<password>&email=<email>&age=<age>
Now if I want to unregister a user, then of the unregister api:
Method will still be POST ,
URI will still be /users ,
arguments may be username=<username>&password=<password>&reason=<reason>
In this situation, two apis share the same url and method with different arguments, and I think it's not a good design.
So question is:
What is the good design against this situation, to make the server-end easier to distinguish two different actions on the same resource?
EDIT
I really appreciate @Tim's suggestions and now I want my question to be more generic:
If there are several different updating actions on a resource, and each of the actions takes different combination of arguments, how should I work out RESTful apis now? Thanks a lot. :)
If you register a user by making a POST (create) request, the opposite - unregistering - should be a DELETE request.
Registering
POST /users HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
username=<username>&password=<password>&email=<email>&age=<age>
Unregistering
You can choose to make a request to /users with the username and password (for verification) in the request body
DELETE /users HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
username=<username>&password=<password>&reason=<reason>
Or make a request to /users/<username> with the password (for verification) and a reason (for whatever purpose) in the request body
DELETE /users/<username> HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
&password=<password>&reason=<reason>
I think the latter is better.
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