Developer documentation

What is REST?

08 november 2021

Rest - Representational State Transfer

The API is built according to the REST Architectural style. REST is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, are supposed to be used. The REST architecture supports lighter weight communications between producer and consumer, which makes it a popular building style for cloud-based APIs such as those provided by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. REST, which typically runs over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), has several constraints. These constraints are the design rules that are applied to establish the distinct characteristics of the REST architectural style:

Read more about Rest

The Reeleezee API is built according to the REST Architectural, which uses various HTTP methods (called verbs) to specify which functionality is required for a specific call. Let us have a look at these verbs to have detailed insight on how to use the Reeleezee API:

HTTP methods for REST services

HTTP Verb	Function	Description
GET	Read	Obtain information from the API as a list or separate item by identifier
PUT	Update / Replace / Create	Update an item by identifier or implicit create this item if it not exists. The implicit Create instead of using a POST and returning an identifier has been chosen to assure the data integrity within an administration. See also: Identifiers
POST	Actions	Perform a specific action on an item like Book, Send etc.
DELETE	Delete	Delete an item by identifier
PATCH	Update/Modify	This verb is not used by the Reeleezee API

Identifiers Obtaining or referring to items via the Reeleezee API is always done through an identifier. Reeleezee has chosen to use Global / Universally unique identifiers (guid, uuid) for this purpose. A (version 4) guid looks like this: 414b3ead-bffc-4661-97b5-1469f90d83d7 More information on guids can be found on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier. You should not try to create these guids yourself, but leave it up to your computer language or operating system.

Dotnet c# => string guid = new Guid().ToString();

Python => guid = str(uuid.uuid4())

PHP => not native, but various solutions exist to create or format a v4 uuid

Items returned by the Reeleezee API always contain an “id” property which contains the guid of this item. When referring to a specific item you must always specify the guid id in the resource. When creating new items, the Reeleezee API requires the caller to provide the new guid and pass it using the PUT verb. This may differ to other solutions where a POST verb will create a new item and return the new guid.