Use of HTTP Methods

[ethndotsh]

Currently, the external API that third-parties can access has a rather unusual style, in my opinion. E.g.

Get user
GET /api/getUser/[userId]

Create user
GET /api/createUser?email=[email]?password=[password]

But, rather than that, use different HTTP methods on the same endpoint. E.g.

Get a user
GET /api/user/[userId]

Create a user
POST /api/user

Delete a user
DELETE /api/user/[userId]

Update a user
PUT /api/user/[userId]

That's what I believe would be better, but please correct me if I am wrong. Also please correct me if I did not showcase the current endpoints correctly.

[beerose]

The naming conventions come from the fact that Blitz exposes RPC API.

The naming you provided is more in a REST style. You can think of it this way:

• in REST (representational state transfer) you have the state, a resource, that you access, modify and so on. Hence you have users/ and you can fetch them, delete them, etc.
• in RPC (remote procedure call) you have procedures, and you call the procedures. It's like literally calling a function, taking a method name and arguments. But that's done over HTTP. That's also why the endpoints are named as your queries/mutations.

[MrLeebo]

To tack onto @beerose's answer, if you want to craft an API suited for third parties, you can always create a separate endpoint using API Routes and follow RESTful patterns in those routes. Third parties don't benefit from the automatic code generation of queries/mutations (yet!) so they'd probably prefer to have a route tailored for them like that anyway.

[ethndotsh]

I see. I thought that all my auto-generated models and their queries/mutations were automatically used for both the data later but also the third-party API.

Or does it do this? This is a very cool framework, just a few things here and there that confuse me.

[beerose]

Yeah, queries/mutations are exposed as RPC API, and that's also what makes it possible to use them directly from the frontend code. At build time, the direct function import is replaced with an RPC network call.

Here's more on RPC API: https://blitzjs.com/docs/rpc-specification