Extensions to REST-API

I'm currently missing some more things in the REST API before it becomes
really useful:
- The ability to look up keys of items in the database, e.g., say I want
  to find the status with the name 'closed'. Now I'd have to perform a
  search with something like:
  .../data/status?name=closed
  and then loop over the results, fetching each item in turn and compare
  the name. The string search is a case insensitive substring search and
  will find stati where the name includes the string 'closed'. So if we
  have another status with the name 'almost closed' it will also be
  found (because it contains the substring 'closed').
  IMO this should be extended to allow key attributes directly in the
  URL, e.g. .../data/status/closed
  Now this would work only for classes that have a key attribute (so we
  can't search for issue title this way) but would be nice for finding a
  certain status or a user (.../data/user/example_username)
- The query on a class should directly yield the attributes if
  requested, so if we specify, say, @verbose=3 we would get all
  attributes (except for content) along with the query, e.g.
  /data/status?@verbose=3 would yield
  'data' : 
      '@total_size': '3'
    , 'collection':
    [ { 'link': ...
      , 'id': '1'
      , 'name': 'open'
      , 'attributes' :
        { 'name' : ...
        , ...
        }
      }
    , ...
    ]
  If this is not possible we're wasting a lot of roundtrip time to
  request each item of which we only have the id (and the label property
  if @verbose is >1 according to Johns latest update) in turn. Similar
  to the same problem in XMLRPC and in the native roundup API (which
  does a separate database request for each item).

What do you think?
One of the problems I'm seeing is different values of @verbose on
/data/issue and /data/issue/1 have different meaning with this
implementation. So maybe we never put the label property in there
(currently as implemented with @verbose>1), use @verbose=1 for the
output example above, make @verbose=1 the default (as in /data/issue/1),
provide the old output with @verbose=0 and add links to other items with
@verbose=2 and content with @verbose=3 like when requesting a single
issue? We could also allow pruning the attributes by specifying an
explicit @attributes parameter (also proposed by John some time ago).

Ralf
-- 
Dr. Ralf Schlatterbeck                  Tel:   +43/2243/26465-16
Open Source Consulting                  www:   http://www.runtux.com
Reichergasse 131, A-3411 Weidling       email: [email protected]