Spring Boot: How to design an efficient REST API?

Resource collections are often enormous, and when some data has to be retrieved from them, it would be only not very efficient to always get the full list and browse it for specific items. Therefore we should design an optimized Search API.

Filtering:
- Narrow down query results by parameters (e.g., country, creation date).
```
GET /api/cars?country=Japan
GET /api/cars?createDate=2019-11-11
```
Sorting:
- Sort results ascending or descending by chosen parameters (e.g., by date).
```
GET /api/cars?sort=createDate,asc
GET /api/cars?sort=createDate,desc
```
Paging:
- Use "limit" to restrict results and "offset" to specify which part of the result range to show.
```
GET /api/cars?limit=100
GET /api/cars?offset=2
```

Combine features:

GET /api/cars?country=Japan&sort=createDate,desc&limit=100&offset=2

Results in the list of 100 cars from Japan, sorted by creation date in descending order, starting from the second page (records 101-200).

How to Run the Project

Clone source code from git

$ git clone https://github.com/Raouf25/Spring-Boot-efficient-search-API.git

Build Docker image

$ docker build -t="spring-boot-efficient-search-api" --force-rm=true .

This command runs Maven build to create a JAR package and builds the Docker image.

Note: Initial command may take time to download the base image from DockerHub

Run Docker Container

$ docker run -p 8080:8080 -it --rm spring-boot-efficient-search-api

Test Application

$ curl localhost:8080/api/cars/1

Response:

{
   "id":1,
   "manufacturer":"Acura",
   "model":"Integra",
   "type":"Small",
   "country":"Japan",
   "createDate":"1931-02-01"
}

Stop Docker Container

docker stop $(docker container ls | grep "spring-boot-efficient-search-api:*" | awk '{ print $1 }')

Live Demo

This project is deployed on https://spring-boot-efficient-search-api.fly.dev/api/cars

Try: Demo Link

Docker Image Repository

Docker Image: raouf25/spring-boot-efficient-search-api

Refer to the Docker Commands section for pulling, running, and querying the API using cURL and jq.

License

For more details please see this medium post .