Ftyjtk

I've read all best practices about Restfull API but they always use simple examples. I often read things like :

GET  /cars      -> return all cars

PUT  /cars/1    -> update car with id 1

etc...

So ok, we name the rest method "cars" because we're dealing with car resources.
But what about "advanced operations" ?

For example, I have a system where users have accounts. I want to create a GET method that allows to check if a person is linked to an account existing in database.

So I can create :

GET  /users/1/10   ->  return users data if user with id 1 is linked to the account with id 10

Is it good to name "/users" my method ? Knowing that the purpose to my method is not really to get user data but check if his account exists in databse

In other words, do we have to name our Rest methods depending on the data we return or depending on the purpose of the method ?

1. if one user has more than one account and if you use two collections for users and accounts then route should be as follows to access a specific resource.

/users/{userId}/accounts/{accountID}.

You always need to maintain the relationship between resources. In this case, an account is a sub-resource of a user.

2. Or you can use filtering as follows

/users/{userId}/accounts?accountId=10