Re: [OT] Not everything goes well in Ruby land :-)

On Jan 7, 2008, at 3:13 PM, Mike Schrag wrote:

>> If you expose any "developer private" information, users are going  
>> to start to rely on it. Consider it UI. Preventing you from making  
>> changes. I.e. Users could start bookmarking URLs with primary keys  
>> in them.
> But that's perfectly valid, right?  RESTful folks would say that  
> your URL's ARE API ...

Excluding component action URLs, I would agree that they are API.   
And if I use a PK in a URL and that PK becomes no longer valid, the  
URL _should_ stop working.  If that is not the correct behavior, then  
the PK is the wrong thing to use in the URL.


> Especially if you start exposing ActiveResource-style RESTful XML  
> services, those are going to have to have SOME sort of ID's in  
> them.  Like Chuck said, you could use some other candidate key, but  
> if you have a sufficient non-OID candidate key that is going to be  
> basically invariant and act in this capacity in your API, why not  
> just make that your PK in WO in the first place?


I lean more towards always making a meaningless PK.  Candidate keys  
have a bad habit of needing changes over the years.  But if I had a  
candidate key, I would prefer to that in my URL.

Chuck

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