Fetching multiple documents from a single request

[flavioamieiro]

This issue was opened by @fccoelho in NAMD/pypln.api#39 but I'm migrating it here because it implies a (big) change in the REST API itself.

"""
The overhead of making a request for each document one wants to download from a large corpus is too large to be acceptable. A batch download should be available which requires a single request. The set of documents could be returned as a tar-ball.

This issue supersedes NAMD/pypln.api#29
"""

[flavioamieiro]

Honestly, I'm not really sure how to address this issue. I really think the biggest overhead in requests is the one addressed by #134. At first glance, I can't think of a clean way of having one endpoint for multiple entities in our REST api.

I would love @israelst 's opinion on this.

[israelst]

Is It about url? I think it depends on the maximum amount of entities.

Some say that querystring is the solution for this: /resource?properties=property1,property2, property3
Google and Facebook do this way.

[flavioamieiro]

@israelst actually, we are talking about getting multiple documents (not properties from a single document - this was implemented in #134).

Should we have an endpoint that allows you to get more than one entity at the same time? I think that, following what you said, it would look something like /documents?ids=1,2,3,65462 and return an array of documents.

[fccoelho]

Independently of how it is done I think this end point should be at the
level of the corpus.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Flávio Amieiro notifications@github.com
wrote:

@israelst https://github.com/israelst actually, we are talking about
getting multiple documents (not properties from a single document - this
was implemented in #134 #134).

Should we have an endpoint that allows you to get more than one entity at
the same time? I think that, following what you said, it would look
something like /documents?ids=1,2,3,65462 and return an array of
documents.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#135 (comment).

Flávio Codeço Coelho

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[israelst]

I was thinking exactly on something like /documents?ids=1,2,3,65462.