Relationships level or basic rules joining related resourses

[deividas]

Hello,

I have tried to google and search in this disccuss board but with no luck. It’s possible that following question is too abstract and arose because i missed something in jsonapi.org specification or here in search results.

The question is about how to handle resourses which are related to each other and also how i should ( by convention ) access these resourses and when i should use relationship between them and when i should access them as seperate resourses.

There’s concrete example. Let’s assume that we have resourses that are related to each other: Countries, States and Cities. So, countries has many states, states has many cities and i’m going implement something like this: http://www.91weblessons.com/demo/codeigniterCountryStateCityDropDown/index.php

The first idea is to have three seperate endpoints:

• /v1/module/countries
• /v1/module/states
• /v1/module/cities

There’s a workflow:

Retrieved all countries from countries endpoint and have chosen “Vietnam”.
Now i need to retrieve all Vietnam states.
When i got all states in some way i have chosen An Giang state and now i need to get all cities for this state.

Should i use here relationship or not and in case i should how it should look like?

There’s some mine thoughts:

• /v1/counties/country:id/relationship/states -
• /v1/states/states:id/relationship/cities

Or should i use just links to original resourses:

• /v1/states?filter[country:id]=country:id
• /v1/cities?filter[state:id]=state:id

If i do understand correctly all these relationships are just links to original resourse just represended in relationship manner. /v1/counties/country:id/relationship/states actualy is link to /v1/states?filter[country:id]=country:id ?

Also i would appreaciate any guidliness related API development.

[deividas]

I have done some research:

@ethanresnick

@giannico

And if musicians also had another association, like, their “preferred” equipment, could those relationships be included as part of the document above, say under data.relationships?

Definitely. The drummer represented is just a standard resource object, so it can certainly include relationships of its own. In fact, it should include those additional relationships if they exist (unless there’s a ?fields restriction). That way, users can just follow one relationship to the next, to the next, without ever having to go back and request /musicians/9 directly.

From here: Usage of `related` field in Relationships link - #8 by ethanresnick

So, in real word example ( from my previous post ) i believe it should like something like this:

GET /v1/module/countries

{
  "links": {
    "self": "https://example.com/v1/module/countries"
  },
  "data": {
    "id": "county_id",
    "type": "countries",
    "relationships": {
      "state": {
        "links": {
          "related": "https://example.com/countries/county_id/states" // states is plural, it's ok?
        },
        "data": {"id": "state_id", "type": "state"}
      }
    }
  },

  "included": [{
    "id": "state_id",
"type": "state",
"attributes": {

},
"relationships": {
  "cities": {
    "links": {
      "related": "https://example.com/state/state_id/cities"  // cities is plural, it's ok?
    },
    "data": {
      "id": "cities", // what about cities id
      "type": "accountProfile"
    }
  }
}]
  }
 }

According this resource: Is it ok to add multiple levels of nested relationships in the relationships field - #2 by ethanresnick

But still i feel like missing something and confused about all these relationships and i don’t see any logical reasoning and connections between this complexity.