Loopback: Alternatives for plural model names in endpoint URLs

[bajtos]

At the moment, LoopBack uses plural form of model name to build the URL where the model is exposed (e.g. Car -> /cars, Person -> /people).

This is a potential issue for non-English developers. For example, plural form of Person may be not obvious for everybody. Furthermore, to support localised (non-English) model names, LoopBack would have to ship with dictionaries for all languages.

Possible solutions proposed by @Setogit:

• Can we simply remove the "plural feature" altogether with no side effects? For example, if we use singular form instead of plural, is any confusion or property name collision incurred?
• Or, can we come up with a more mechanical rule so that we don't need dictionary and super clear for global developers.

/cc @strongloop/loopback-devs

[raymondfeng]

I'm cool to use the model name by default and provide a way to customize it.

[superkhau]

+1 for use whatever they define as the model name and provide a way to customize it

[fabien]

I think there will be side-effects, though. Most resources should conceptually be regarded as plural.

What's wrong with just using the manually set plural as before? The only part I don't really like right now is that this plural value is used directly for the url.

I would much prefer a new option urlPrefix or similar to control this, and in case it's omitted, it should fall back to pluralName as before. This would also allow multi-segment prefixes like: /api/things/cars.

Perhaps we should even allow syntax like: /(cars|voitures|whatever) to match different versions (though I would personally be hesitant to take localization this far).

[mikelax]

I agree with @fabien in that the concept of plural should exist. This way the convention of /pluralobject/{id} maintains the expected hierarchy of List -> Single Object

I am relatively new to loopback but there is an option to manually provide a value for "plural". Doesn't this allow the user to tailor the API naming to their liking?

[dharmendrasdlt]

I m not able to access different models with same plurals but each having different endpoints ?

my-model.js with /{version}/user/my-model/ and your-model.js with /{version}/user/your-model/

I m also not able to access invoke different remoteMethods in same model like this

my-model.js with /{version}/user/ and your-model.js with /{version}/user/your-model/

method is GET

[intensite]

I too, like the original poster, would like a way to let the developers decide if the endpoints should be plural or singular.

In our case, the singular form is desired.

[bajtos]

For completeness, there are already several possible ways how to customize Model's root path:

• You can customize plural setting in your model.json and set it e.g. to the singular form.

  {
    "name": "Product",
    "plural": "product",
    "properties": {
    }
  }
  

  • You can provide custom http.path value in model settings (model.json file):

  {
    "name": "Product",
    "http": {
      "path": "/product"
    },
    "properties": {
    }
  }
  

  We have a unit-test covering this scenario too, see https://github.com/strongloop/loopback/blob/0f40ca8f8eb1ed50cc588ae72893ce2ca33d80a2/test/rest.middleware.test.js#L139-L148

I think the question then is what should be default - singular or plural?

On the other hand, considering that the next major version of LoopBack is going to use a different approach to building REST APIs (data models are decoupled from the HTTP API layer, the API is defined via Controllers which have full control over all aspects), I think it makes very little sense to go through the pain of changing the default model path in the current codebase, and this issue should be closed.