APIBaas Usage Titbits

There are some titbits that help to make your experience with API BaaS collections easy and faster.

• Use name property in the entities of BaaS collections. The value of name is unique in a BaaS collection across entities.
• The value of the name property could be anything that is user defined and meaningful for the application. The only criterion is that it should be unique.
• For example, if the name of the collection is stores then the value of the name property could be unique ID of a store. Below is an example of the stores collection.

GET <baas_app_name>/stores
{
"UUID":"sasasdxxx"
"name":"store_ID_1",
"store_name":"ABC",
"region:": "AP"
..
},
{
"UUID":"erdfdfccvxxx"
"name":"store_ID_2",
"store_name":"EFG",
"region:": "EU"
..
}

• Note that in the above collection stores, each entity should have a unique value for the name property.
• Like UUID, the value of name property can be used to retrieve the entity by using the the following API call.

GET <baas_app_name>/stores/<value_of_name> 

For example, using the above collection, we can use 

GET <baas_app_name>/stores/store_ID_1 

to retrieve the entity 

{
"UUID":"sasasdxxx"
"name":"store_ID_1",
"store_name":"ABC",
"region:": "AP"
..
}

• Using the value of the name in the URL as described above will be always faster when compared to using select query as below.

 GET <baas_app_name>/stores?select * where name="store_ID_1" 

• This is because, the select queries always involve searching elasticsearch index. Whereas value of name in the URL will bypass the elastic search.
• If there is any latency indexing entities in elasticsearch the select queries fail to retrieve the corresponding entity. However the former approach always will retrieve the entity.