Document Query use cases

[bblfish]

There are many places where it seems to make sense to have the server support some form of query. This could be done by adding a QUERY verb or even potentially allow GET to accept a body with a query. (see thread Proposed HTTP SEARCH method by the LDP group in April 2015 to the HTTP mailing list.

This is quite a lot of work to implement, so it should only be done when it is clear what the value of doing it is.

There usually are ways of doing things without such a query feature, but doing it that way may actually make things much more complex. We'll only know if we document the cases where a decision was made to do things one way, that could have been achieved more easily with a query.

I opened up a wiki page to document such use cases: Query Use Cases

[akuckartz]

Triple Pattern Fragments are rather simple to implement and would allow implementing queries by clients.

[bblfish]

That's worth adding to the wiki, as otherwise this thread will soon be unreadable.

[zoggy]

Hello,

Here is one additional use case I think could be added to the wiki page.

Suppose you have a solid app to publish blog posts. You may want to provide a rss feed listing the N last blog posts. To do so, you'd like to be able to query all blog posts in a workspace (or under a container) and retrieve their date, title, ... and build a feed from this information. The building of the feed needs not being part of the solid spec, but the way to query workspaces and containers should.