please support the ability to expand parts of a resource representation [DATAREST-243]

Josh Long opened DATAREST-243 and commented

It's often desirable to return inline the representation of some resource that has a relationship to the current resource.

So, for example, if i were to request an item resource for users (e.g. users/132), i might by default get a link to the association resource (e.g. the user's customers). For efficiency's sake, it can often be useful to inline the associations in the parent request. This is the REST equivalent of Hibernate's 1+N query problem for 1..N relationships.

Often, this may be implemented as simply as something like /users?expand=customers. Netflix, for example, does a form of this in their API.

In theory this could work the other way around, too: you might have an exclude request param that omits parts of the data

Issue Links:

• DATAREST-221 Support use case-driven inlining of managed resources

8 votes, 15 watchers