Singular vs Plural Resources

[dgeb]

I'd like to discuss the use of the plural form of a resource name, regardless of whether a single object or an array of objects is returned.

For example, a single post is to be returned as posts:

{
  "posts": {
    // an individual post document
  }
}

Just like an array of resources:

{
  "posts": [{
    // an individual post document
  }, {
    // an individual post document
  }]
}

I can see some advantages to this approach:

• it ensures that a single record won't be included twice (e.g. as a post and as a member of posts)
• it may reduce the needs for an inflector in the client (although model names are often singularized, in which case singular/plural translations are still needed)
• it makes the client leaner by eliminating the need to check both singular/plural forms of the noun

The disadvantages I see:

• it is arguably semantically incorrect to return a single object with a plural key
• it breaks with the conventions in stock Rails, AMS and most REST APIs I've encountered

It would be good to discuss this further and clarify the rationale in the spec.

[wycats]

This is a dup of #8 (which has a poor title). I'd love to get your feedback on my comment there.