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I wondered recently - where do large queries fit in to this ? URL encoding has size limits and is inefficient - but you can't use get body

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If you want to be purely restful, you'd POST your request with all the parameters, which would create a new query resource, and then return the query resource ID. You would then make a second GET request with just the query ID.

The GET would be cacheable because they query would be repeatable and idempotent. In theory you'd never have to make the POST more than once unless you are creating a new query, which would make a new ID.

That would be an operation in this API definition.

See section 13.

I use POST for complex queries for this reason. Some things aren't easily URI encoded. Easier to just post JSON. Not pure REST, but I'm not really seeking purity...

Yea that's what everyone does but it seems like a pretty big oversight in REST

It's not an oversight in REST, it's one of the ways of trying to faithfully implement REST over HTTP, which has a gaping hole in the standard set of methods that messes with that use case. While HTTP (specifically 1.1) is an implementation of REST principles, that use case wasn't front-and-center at the time (PATCH is also a recent fix to another hole.)

There have been proposed standardized fixes such as generalizing the HTTP SEARCH method that first appeared in WebDAV[0], but none have yet gone far.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-snell-search-method-01

I suppose you could POST the query object and receive a 201 Created with Location header and then retrieve the results via GET?

Or complex nested queries, such as those frequently created in a CRM specifying many key value pairs with different comparators: =, >, <, !=, LIKE. Add complex sorting instructions, pagination instructions, etc.

Technically GET request allow a body in the HTTP spec if I remember correctly. It's just that most implementations don't support it.

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