Filtering Collections

Clients often need a specific subset of a collection. A customer might want only private reading lists the customer created during a particular week. Downloading every list and discarding unwanted results wastes work and may produce an incomplete answer if the client filters only the first page. The API needs to select the matching resources before returning a bounded result.

Filtering defines which members of a collection satisfy a caller's criteria.

This chapter explains filter contracts, value semantics, logical combinations, validation, access boundaries, pagination, and execution cost using a fictional bookstore API over HTTPS.