Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 258 posts

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#21

Post by sealthedeal »

hermitdev wrote: post #18
gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

> returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. This just reminded me of a long ago incident at a former employer. I worked in back-office at a hedge fund and was responsible for maintaining several APIs & services written in C++. The APIs were pretty straight forward query for object(s), get back a vector of objects. If nothing was found, you'd ge…

I would expect an empty array to always be returned regardless

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#22

Post by omgtehlion »

gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

> returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item

this happens when you add JSON version for old XML-based APIs (seen this multiple times)

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#24

Post by tbirdz »

hermitdev wrote: post #18
gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

> returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. This just reminded me of a long ago incident at a former employer. I worked in back-office at a hedge fund and was responsible for maintaining several APIs & services written in C++. The APIs were pretty straight forward query for object(s), get back a vector of objects. If nothing was found, you'd ge…

I really don't like your story. The junior is clearly behaving immaturely and inappropriately by CCing others and not using an appropriate tone, but your response is to... retaliate by doing the exact same thing to him? What lesson is the junior supposed to learn here? That acting that way is A-OK as long as you have seniority and are factually correct? At least the junior has the "excuse" of being a junior, but really as a more senior person you should have known better.

Surely there must have been a better way for you to handle this situation.

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#25

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

akurtzhs wrote: post #5
gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

returning a null array to represent no items To be honest, that's what I'd expect. What do you dislike about that result, and what would you prefer to see returned? Jump straight to 404? returning a single object without an array to represent one item. So an array if there's multiple results, and a bare object for a single result? That's unpleasant.

If an API is expected to return an array, but the data set is empty, I expect an empty array. I should be able to go straight from the request to a for-each loop without checking for null.

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#26

Post by tomaszs »

Personally i think API should be obligatory. Every company should provide it with respect for private data. Additionaly if a company does not have it, it should be prohibited to block automatic measures to process the system and data.

There should be a pricing model to cover basic expenses made by the API usage.

Maybe you wonder why on earth it should be legally allowed to process automatically system data?

We have a lots of great services online. But we can not move further, integrate them into even better ones, because of lack of APIs and bot bans.

Without it, we wont be able to create high level services people expect. And currently if these will be provided, than only by companies that have Monopoly over vast parts of online offering. Because they can make more monopolistic deals with service providers.

Another problem is that service owners have adventage over users. Because they can process users data to drive business decisions torwards them. But users can not process thr same data for their adventage. With more and more complicated systems user ends up being dependant on the company service and has no possibility of validation.

And this means even more trouble than we have today. So ye, open programmatic access as a human right.

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#27

Post by [deleted] »

gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

[deleted]

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#28

Post by favorited »

gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

There's often a semantic difference between null and empty.

Like, if I'm checking the result of a batch processing job, I want to know if the job finished & resulted in an empty set, or there is simply no result yet.

It's "the thing you're looking for doesn't exist" vs. "the thing you're looking for exists, but is empty."

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#29

Post by purple_ducks »

omgtehlion wrote: post #22
gtsteve wrote: post #2

I was expecting to see two of my pet hates - returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item. I also once worked with an API where you had to send the data in POST format - abc=123&def=456. After much pressure from their customers, they finally relented and added an XML version of their API... where your request could look like this: abc=123&def=456 .…

> returning a null array to represent no items, and returning a single object without an array to represent one item this happens when you add JSON version for old XML-based APIs (seen this multiple times)

> this happens when you add JSON version for old XML-based APIs (seen this multiple times)

...without using an XSD schema. With a schema,not an issue

Re: API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

#30

Post by seph-reed »

Glyptodon wrote: post #19

I thought the chosen example for idempotent requests was a bit funny as I don't think POST is necessarily idempotent and depending on your specific use case making it so may or may not be easy.

It requires passing in an id of some sort. Client generated ids are cool for a lot of things; I wouldn't use them for everything.
Post reply on HN