RESTful API: How to model JSON representation?
- by Jan P.
I am designing a RESTful API for a booking application. You can request a list of accommodations. And that's where I don't really know how to design the JSON represenation. This is my XML representation:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<accommodations>
<accommodation>
<name>...</name>
<category>couch</category>
</accommodation>
<accommodation>
<name>...</name>
<category>room</category>
</accommodation>
<accommodations>
My first try to convert this to JSON resulted in this output (1):
{
"0": {
"name": "...",
"category": "couch"
},
"1": {
"name": "...",
"category": "room"
}
}
But as I looked how others APIs did it, I found something looking more like this (2):
[
{
"name": "...",
"category": "couch"
},
{
"name": "...",
"category": "room"
}
]
I know version 1 is an object, and version 2 an array.
But which one is better in this case?
