C#•4w ago

✅ When should you or shouldnt you return nested data in an api call?

Let's say I have a these tables in my database, Project, Members, Task, Comments and I want to return paginated data so a user can view all their projects, then view the tasks and members associated with the project and the comments associated with the individual tasks. Would you do this as all separate queries or do one query that returns all the data nested and paginated? Here's my current thought process.

- Load all Projects paginated - One api call only project data
- Once you have the list of Projects a user can click one

- When a Project page loads another api call will fire and get all the Tasks paginated.

Now this is where I get a little confused
- When you load the Task page the api should return all the Task data, but does it also return the Comments in the same api call? How would they be paginated? 

- Or do you do a 2nd api call that returns all the comments paginated. Keeping every api call super specific and only doing one thing.

- Load all Projects paginated - One api call only project data
- Once you have the list of Projects a user can click one

- When a Project page loads another api call will fire and get all the Tasks paginated.

Now this is where I get a little confused
- When you load the Task page the api should return all the Task data, but does it also return the Comments in the same api call? How would they be paginated? 

- Or do you do a 2nd api call that returns all the comments paginated. Keeping every api call super specific and only doing one thing.

3 Replies

Anton•4w ago

It depends on what the frontend needs to display at that moment Apis should be suited to the frontend Or be one-size-fit-all If you tailor them to the frontend, and you would display the first few comments always, include those few first comments If you don't show comments, paginate them separately the way you paginate should also depend on the needs of the frontend Do this if you don't have a specific frontend one-size-fit-all should either guess what the frontend would typically want, or only return a single thing jus comments, just posts, etc

CydoOP•4w ago

Perfect so this is what I'm trying to do, structure my apis to match the front end i already built out. However my next question is if ur fetching the data from the database for something like a task and it's comments, should u get the single task and all of its comments and then loop over the comments up to say 5 and then send the 5 comments back in the json response to the client. and then have a seperate end point thats just gonna keep fetching the paginated comments for that task or instead do 2 separate api calls from the start, one for the task, and the other just getting the 5 comments for that task and then creating the json response object, and have them load independently on the front end, and then every time u wanna get the next page of comments u already have that getPaginatedComments endpoint to call Nvm think I figured out the answer and I should use projections to go over the returned data and structuring it how I want before mapping it to a dto and sending it the client

Anton•4w ago

Ideally you want to fetch everything in a single database roundtrip, project to a dto

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✅ When should you or shouldnt you return nested data in an api call?