What HTTP method to use when querying a collection by IDs

Question

What HTTP method should I use if I want to query a collection for the given IDs that possibly go over 500 items. Like:

GET /api/v2.0/collection/?ids=1,2,3,4,5,6...

Query param is not gonna look good with over 500 items. and GET doesn't have a Content-Size. POST seems not a good fit since I'm just fetching the resources selectively. What would you great programmers do? Do you know any public example I can check?

It seems that this is just filtering/searching, please have a look here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5020704/how-to-design-restful-search-filtering — Opal, Jun 20 '16 at 09:21

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 18 '16 at 22:11

One way to deal with a situation like this is to make the ids collection into their own resource. For example, you can create a selector resource to which you can POST the ids like:

POST /api/v2.0/selectors
[1,2,3,4,5,6,...]

The POST request would return a selector <id>, which you can use to query the collection resource like:

GET /api/v2.0/collections?selector=<id>

What HTTP method to use when querying a collection by IDs

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