Re: HATEOAS on demand

To receive links, your clients will have to know about the X-LINK_RELATIONS from the documentation. That's out of band information that a client needs to have prior knowledge about, your API is no longer Hypermedia driven. The purpose of REST constraints (incl. HATEOAS) is to allow clients and servers to evolve independently while preserving interop. This matters when designing APIs for internet timescales, i.e. that could potentially exist for decades. 

Having said that, if you control both client and server software, the API's do not have to be REST. 

BR/Rahul


On Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 at 4:11 AM, Owen Rubel <orubel@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not sure if this is the right place to send but wanted to discuss my hatred for HATEOAS because it sends so much additional and unwanted information with every request/response.
> 

> So in my spring-boot plugin I solved this by auto-generating (via recursive lookup) only when a specific header is sent (https://beapi-io.github.io/beapi-docs/0.9/advanced.html#section-6)
> 

> That way if you WANT the link relations, you can get them on demand.
> 

> But endpoints do not default to that.
> 

> Best of both worlds. Thoughts?
> 

> Owen Rubel
> orubel@gmail.com