{"id":77,"date":"2013-03-29T17:14:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-29T17:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chalakanth.wordpress.com\/?p=77"},"modified":"2013-04-20T22:43:11","modified_gmt":"2013-04-20T22:43:11","slug":"how-to-avoid-sending-nullempty-fields-between-a-restful-service-and-a-client","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seonthemon.com\/wp351\/2013\/03\/29\/how-to-avoid-sending-nullempty-fields-between-a-restful-service-and-a-client\/","title":{"rendered":"How to avoid sending null\/empty fields between a RESTful service, and a client?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By it strictest definition, a RESTful service sends and receives ‘resources<\/em>‘, which when seen from an object-oriented perspective, are largely the objects of your domain model. \u00a0An insurance policy, a bill, a payment, a car, a truck, a driver, a patient, a nurse, a clinic, etc.<\/p>\n

Often, an instance of the object that you are putting on the wire has null fields. \u00a0 Here is a patient at a clinic, whose middle name and date of birth, we don’t have.<\/p>\n

{\r\n       \"patientId\": \"THX1138\",\r\n       \"firstName\": \"John\",\r\n       \"middleName\": null,\r\n       \"lastName\": Patient,\r\n       \"dateOfBirth\": null,\r\n       \"address\": \"1, \u00a0Illness From, \u00a0Bankruptcy, HA-00000, USA\"\r\n}<\/pre>\n
In the mobile world, where we now pay for data usage, and where connections can be slow, it might be useful to minimize the amount of data we throw on the wire. \u00a0 When the mobile app retrieves the above person, John Patient, I want to drop the fields (middle name, and date of birth) that are null, and send just this.<\/p>\n
{\r\n       \"patientId\": \"THX113\",\r\n       \"firstName\": \"John\",\r\n       \"lastName\": Patient,\r\n       \"address\": \"1, \u00a0Way Ticket To, \u00a0Bankruptcy, HA-00000, USA\"\r\n}<\/pre>\n
Further, I want the mobile app to be similarly discriminating when it sends data back to the RESTful service at the server.<\/p>\n
In effect, the marshalling mechanism at both ends should be able to create the patient object with just the data that is available, and leave the rest of the fields null.<\/p>\n
Javascript works that way natively. \u00a0 If I was running Javascript at both endpoints, the core language itself would pretty much give us this behavior (Ah, node.js<\/a>!).<\/p>\n
I expect this is possible in other environments too. \u00a0 In particular, I will need to look into this for the following.<\/p>\n