Category: Costs to Expect

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Almost one year in, the fun begins

The Costs to Expect API is approaching the point where it includes all the standard and expected features; you can add items, edit, list, delete and summarise the data, all the features you would expect at a minimum from a basic Rest API.

This summer, the fun begins, almost one year after development began I get to start work on the non-standard features and start developing the Costs to Expect service.

It took a long time to get here, well, a year. One year ago, I had an idea; now there is a Rest API, three web apps that use the API and a shiny new website showcasing five years of data that we have collected.

I know what we have planned for the next couple of months, and I know the long term goals, it is going to be interesting to look back again in 12 months to see how much progress there was and how much we still have to do.

I’ll blog more about the specific features when I start development, during the summer, I expect progress will slow slightly as I spend time with my family.

Costs to Expect API – https://api.costs-to-expect.com
Costs to Expect Website – https://www.costs-to-expect.com
Costs to Expect on GitHub – https://github.com/costs-to-expect

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API endpoints, filtering, sorting, searching, limiting and summarising

The Costs to Expect API is developing slowly; features get added as I need them, v1.15.0 is an exciting release, it will be the first time an endpoint in the API can be filtered, sorted, limited, searched and summarised.

I’ve written previously about summarising collections, with the release of search in v1.15.0 it makes send to describe all options supported by the items (/v1/resource-types/[resource-type]/resources/[resource]/items) collection on the Costs to Expect API.

By default, the items collection returns all child expenses in reverse chronological order, ‘all’ and ‘reverse chronological’ are sensible defaults; however, the API is limited if the collection always returns everything, you need to be able to filter, sort, limit, search and summarise.

The Costs to Expect API supports filtering, sorting, limiting and searching via parameters appended to the URI, collections are summarised by prepending /summary/ to the URI. Summary endpoints support the same filtering and searching options as their companion collections, limiting and sorting don’t make any sense in the context of a summary.

A URI can quickly become unreadable when multiple GET parameters are assigned, to attempt and improve readability I have grouped sorting and searching.

The OPTIONS requests for the Costs to Expect API detail all the supported GET parameters, in addition to giving an overview of each parameter, the OPTIONS requests list which fields and sortable and searchable. The sort and search parameters both allow multiple conditions.

Limiting a collection is handled as expected, there is an offset parameter to define the start record and a limit parameter to define the number of records requested.

Filtering a collection is handled via individual parameters, filtering is more common than searching and in my opinion needs to be the most verbose, when reviewing a URI the filtering parameters should be more visible.

This solution won’t work for everyone; however, if you need to support filtering, searching, sorting, limiting and summarising, I think it provides an excellent level or readability while still being practical.