How to design Restful URIs with mapping based resources - django

Question

I am using Django rest framework for writing some rest API in which I have two primary resources as Store and Product.
Now the URIs for these resources are like
List all the stores GET /stores/
List store with ID GET /stores/:id/
Add a new store POST /stores/
Update some attributes in a store PUT /stores/:id/
Same is applicable to products
List all the products GET /products/
List product with ID GET /products/:id/
Add a new product POST /products/
Update some attributes in a product PUT /products/:id/
Now i want to map some products to some stores like if store A is selling products with ID 1 to 100 and store B is selling products with ID 70 to 200.
With this i have got another resource as store_product_mappings
Now i can treat it as above and make URIs for this resource as
List all the store_product_mappings GET /store_product_mappings/
List store_product_mapping with ID GET /store_product_mappings/:id/
Add a new store_product_mapping POST /store_product_mappings/
Update some attributes in a store_product_mapping PUT /store_product_mappings/:id/
But now this mapping id isn't exposed to the consumers of this API. So in order to avoid this complexity i want to make a easilty understandable URI like
To list all the products inside a store GET /stores/:id/products/
To list a product inside a store GET /stores/:id/products/:product_id
To update a product inside a store PUT /stores/:id/products/:product_id
But according to this approach if i do post on this URI
POST /stores/:id/products/
It should create a new mapping resource and return the ID for that mapping resource, in the similar way it will expect the mapping id when i want to retrieve that resource back like
GET /stores/:id/products/:id
But i don't want to expose mapping ids as it's part of my internal system and consumers of API shouldn't need to worry about it. I am still looking for solutions for this kind of use case and resources in Django rest framework.
Let me know if someone has already faced the similar issue and with what approach they were able to implement this without violating the Rest API conventions.

Answer 1

This request:
POST /stores/:storeid/products/
can expose the product_id as part of the URI returned:
Location: /stores/{storeid}/products/{productid}
It does not need to tell you the technical id of the mapping row in your database. Remember, you don't have to expose database rows one-to-one in your REST API.
As a sidenote, if your clients are Hypertext driven (as they should be), they don't have to parse or construct URIs manually, therefore it would be not that important what you expose in the URIs.