Category: Development

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Summer of fun

If I maintain the same development pace as the last eight weeks, I’m due to have a “Summer of fun”.

I’m two weeks away, one development iteration from a point in which I’ll be comfortable letting the Costs to Expect API and website run throughout the summer untouched.

They won’t be untouched; both the website and API are under active development; I’ll focus my energy on building the service, not the public website.

Dependant on your experience, as a developer, you don’t typically get to spend too much time working on new projects solving problems entirely new to you. Mid-way through July, that is me, I’m planning on locking myself in my office and getting down and dirty with my IDE, whiteboard, pen and paper.

My wife and children have told me that they have a very different idea on what a “Summer of fun” is; I’m guessing it is far less coding than my plan.

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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.