Query vs. Matrix Params or Path Params

6 Responses

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1. Igor Minar says

   good stuff! thanks for putting all of this info together.

   June 11, 2009, 15:50
2. Dorian Taylor says

   Hey, thanks for the shoutout.

   August 12, 2009, 08:24
3. James Collins says

   Hi Brett, the content for this post seems to have disappeared. I would be very grateful if I could see a copy. We’re having a discussion on my firm on query parameters vs. matrix parameters in RESTful service URIs. Thanks!

   July 14, 2011, 02:34
4. admin says

   site5 moved hosts recently.

   here is a dump of the raw content in the mean time.

   I’ve come across a few posts about Matrix Parameters recently and there is a lot of misunderstanding.

   There are several old posts that discuss and describe these things:

   * `Query Strings Considered Harmful `_
   * `w3c MatrixURIs `_

   I’ve summarised what I think is important:
   – urls with query params `won’t have their response cached by intermediaries/proxies (at present)`_
   – matrix parameters may appear anywhere in path
   – `calculating the relative uri`_ is different
   – much more than uri convention

   – query params are generally abused to add new verbs instead of using existing methods on resources
   – matrix parameters are not resources, they are aspects that help reference a resource in an information space that is difficult to represent within a hierarchy

   **Tip: If you’re not sure if you should use them then don’t.**

   Matrix parameters are used with
   * `YUI paging widgets `_
   * `RoR`_ /some/resource/id;edit
   * J2ee fallsback to ;jsessionid=xxx when no cookies can be set.
   * `Jersey (JAX-RS RefImpl) has good support `_

   .. _RoR: http://rails.org

   .. _won’t have their response cached by intermediaries/proxies (at present):

   Caching Issues
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   Intermediaries (proxies) won’t cache any url with a query parameter in the url
   * this is because in the early days of the web, they didn’t trust the Cache control information from dynamically generated pages.
   * Freshness and Validation information are very important pieces of information and the proxy admins took a cautious stance and didn’t cache any of it.

   As the web has matured the views of devs/admins are changing, the new versions of Squid will default to cache any urls with query parameters

   Obviously this could have a very large impact, I’ve heard google maps image tiles had this issue with some proxies at one time.

   .. _calculating the relative uri:

   Relative URI calculations
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

   Relative URIs have different affects, as relatives URLs are determined by appending to the Base URI. For Query Parameter requests they are stripped from the Base.

   For those still interested I would recommend checking out the following in addition to the `RFC-2616 `_ of course.

   * `the matrix revisited `_
   * `PathsAndQueryStrings `_
   * `http url path parameter syntax `_
   * `Building URIs `_

   July 18, 2011, 13:44
5. James Collins says

   Thanks, Brett!

   July 20, 2011, 08:45
6. Bibin sunny says

   cool man …a new piece of information

   November 29, 2011, 00:13