Limit the number of service calls in a RESTful application
- by Slavo
Imagine some kind of a banking application, with a screen to create accounts. Each Account has a Currency and a Bank as a property, Currency being a separate class, as well as Bank. The code might look something like this:
public class Account
{
public Currency Currency { get; set; }
public Bank Bank { get; set; }
}
public class Currency
{
public string Code { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
public class Bank
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Country { get; set; }
}
According to the REST design principles, each resource in the application should have its own service, and each service should have methods that map nicely to the HTTP verbs. So in our case, we have an AccountService, CurrencyService and BankService.
In the screen for creating an account, we have some UI to select the bank from a list of banks, and to select a currency from a list of currencies. Imagine it is a web application, and those lists are dropdowns. This means that one dropdown is populated from the CurrencyService and one from the BankService. What this means is that when we open the screen for creating an account, we need to make two service calls to two different services. If that screen is not by itself on a page, there might be more service calls from the same page, impacting the performance. Is this normal in such an application? If not, how can it be avoided? How can the design be modified without going away from REST?
