Talking to the BigQuery API - Google BigQuery Analytics - page 121

REST Collections

To make an API RESTful, you can take the main objects— users , for
example—and expose operations on them as operations on collections of
those objects. The endpoint that responds to those operations is a simple
URL, usually with the name of the collection as part of the URL. For
instance, the method to create a user wouldn't be called “create.” It would
be an insert operation into the users collection (called Users.insert() )
that you'd send to the users URL.

REST collections respond to a standardized set of operations, or HTTP
verbs. The verb is the first portion of the HTTP protocol. When you open
a web page in your browser, it sends a GET request to the server you're
accessing. If you are updating data—submitting a form, for instance—it uses
the POST verb instead. The HTTP 1.1 specification describes a few more
verbs that can come in handy when accessing REST collections, as shown in
Table 5.1 .

Table 5.1 REST Verbs

Method name Verb Description

Adds a resource to the collection

insert() POST

Gets a single resource in the collection

get() GET

Lists resources

list() GET

Updates an entire resource

update() PUT

PATCH Updates a portion of a resource

patch()

DELETE Deletes a resource delete()

To list objects in a collection, you send a GET request to the base URL
of the collection. For instance, in BigQuery, there is a Projects collection,
representing the projects that are visible to the logged-in user. To list your
projects, you can send an HTTP request to

GET

https://www.googleapis.com/bigquery/v2/projects .

To read a particular object in a REST collection, send a GET request to
the URL of the object. In BigQuery, the Datasets collection is nested under
the projects collection; you can read the metadata for the dataset
bigquery-e2e:application_logs object by sending a GET request to