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On Apr 5, 2005 7:39 AM, Marc de Graauw <marc@m...> wrote: > I've got an actual project I wasn't able to do with REST in a satisfactory > way (although I would have liked to). > > I have been writing a SOAP/WSDL specification for HL7v3 messages for the > Dutch Health Authority. > > Those HL7v3 messages are in XML, and derived from older (v2) non-XML > formats, so the messages themselves have a quite venerable age. As an > example, an important class of messages is query/response. An example I've > been working on is a query with (among others) a patient id, which gets a > response with all medication that has been prescribed to this patient. In > HL7v3 the queries themselves have a lot of elements. With SOAP this is not > much of a problem: both the query and response are XML messages. With REST I > have the following options: > - Use GET, and translate the query to a URI. Now I have two different > formats for query and response, and an awful long and hard-to-read URI. > - Use POST to send the XML query and fetch the XML response. This is not > very RESTful, since the patient's medication history in the response is > naturally a resource, and GET is the RESTful way to retrieve a resource. (If > I follow this solution, I would end up using POST for all or almost all > HL7v3 interactions. If I add an envelope and headers, I've almost got SOAP > over HTTP.) POST is perfectly appropriate for such large queries. If you wanted to do that query multiple times then you can create a new URI while handling the POST and return that URI with the results. That newly created URI would allow you to do a GET to perform the same query as the inital POST. -joe -- Joe Gregorio http://bitworking.org
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