What to do with non-resource responses?

[arunas-smala]

I already asked it on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49754327/json-api-for-non-resource-responses

But I use jsonapi-server for my backend so I think you guys should know answer also..

What to do with endpoints which are not about resources and does not have ID?

For example, in our application, there is an endpoint http://example.com/stats which should return stats of current logged in user. Like

{
  "active_things": 23,
  "last_login": "2017"
}

There is no id for this "resource" (it's not actually a resource, is it?). Backend just collects some "stats" for logged in user and returns an object of stats. There many endpoints like this in this application, for example, we have Notification center page where the user can change email addresses for different notifications.

So frontend app (single-page-app) first has to get current values and it sends the request to GET http://example.com/notification-settings.

{
  "notifications_about_new_thing": "arunas@example.com",
  "notification_about_other_thing": "arunas@example.com"
}

And there are many more endpoints like this. The problem is - how to return these responses in JSONAPI format? There is no ID in these endpoints.

And the biggest question is - why nobody else is facing this issue (at least I cannot find any discussion about this)? :D All APIs I ever made has some endpoints which don't have "id".

I have two ideas, first is to fake id, like "id": "doesnt_matter", the second - do not use json-api for these endpoints. But I don't like both of them.

[arunas-smala]

I need to read specification again :) I think I got the idea

[paparomeo]

Glad you figured it out @arunas-smala!