I'm trying to find the appropriate design for RESTful design of URLs for search and for collections of items.
The setup: we have two models, Cars and Garages, where Cars can be in Garages. Base URLs:
/car/xxx (xxx = car id)
/garage/yyy (yyy = garage id)
Now we want to provide a search for cars - eg. show me all the blue sedans with 4 doors. What's the appropriate URL?
1 - /cars/color/blue/type/sedan/doors/4
2 - /cars/color:blue/type:sedan/doors:4
3 - /cars/?color=blue&type=sedan&doors=4
4 - /car/search/...
None of these are satisfying.
1 through 3 use "cars" as the base (as opposed to "car"). So the pattern for doing searches / collections would be to pluralize the model. This seems ok.
1 has arbitrary ordering of the fields and no good way to distinguish fields versus their values. 2 is slightly better, but still doesn't seem right.
3 uses the QUERYSTRING for the parameters instead of the PATHINFO, and frankly looks better to me, but I've heard of objections to using QUERYSTRING. The problem I have with it is it's not consistent - if I was searching on a single field my URL would probably be: /cars/color/red or something like that. Having the URL drastically change form just because there are more search parameters seems wrong.
4 uses the "car" base url along with the verb "search". That seems wrong - verbs shouldn't be part of the URL, right? It's been suggested several times though.
Now a slightly different case - let's find all the cars in a given garage:
1 - /garage/yyy/cars
2 - /cars/?garage=yyy
1 seems pretty good in this case.
Please chime in with your thoughts, either in the comments here or in the Stackoverflow thread.