What is the best approach or best practice to consume a REST API within a multi-paged website on client side?
Lets assume I have the following REST API defined
/product -> all products, high level information
/product/{id} -> detailed product information about product with given id
Further assume that my website has two .html pages, index.html and detail.html.
Inside the index.html I would query all products with high level information from my REST API with an AJAX call in Javascript. I then alter a table element inside the index.html page with the received JSON and display the high level information of each product inside this table.
Each table entry also has a link to the detailed product information, e.g. url/products/42.
Now to the interesting part. If I press the link of one specific product and want to show the detail.html page with detailed information about the pressed product id, how to I tell the Javascript inside detail.html which product the user pressed and is to be queried from the REST API?
I know how I perform these REST API calls in a native mobile app, since I always know, which element a user has pressed. I am a little bit lost how to do this on a multi paged website application.
Thanks to enrich my mind :)
Juan Pablo Isaza
There are many ways to achieve what you want. Here some leads with basic code examples to show you the logic.
You could generate links like url/detail.html?product=42 then when detail page is loading extract parameter from url using something like
// detail.html
<script type="text/javascript">
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
const queryString = window.location.search;
console.log(queryString);
//?product=42
const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(queryString);
const product = urlParams.get('product')
console.log(product);
// 42
// here request your api with your product
});
You also could use click event on link
<!--index.html-->
<div id="container">
<!-- some html -->
<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="loadProduct(42)">
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="yourJS.js"></script>
//yourJS.js
let loadProduct = (product) => {
// request API then for example use your detail.html as template to parse response
// and inject into html
};