How to pass an array of objects through a query string according to REST?

Issue

What is the best practice to pass an array of objects throught query string in REST style?

For example, the array:

examples[] = [
  { 
    name: "foo",
    value: "1"
  },
  {
    name: "bar",
    value: "2"
  }
]

I thought about it:
/items?examples[0][name]=foo&examples[0][value]=1&examples[1}[name]=bar&examples[1][value]=2
Are there other ways to do this?

Upd:
I need readable URL to show it to the user in the address field. It should display state of some filters in the table, I'm not sending it to the backend.

Solution

Since you're parsing this manually in JS, you could keep the structure you have and just write a parsing function

var items = {}; 

location.search.split("?")[1].split("&").map((q) => {
  var [token, value] = q.split("="),
      [idx, key] = /\[([0-9+])\]\[(\w+)\]/g.exec(token).slice(1, 3);
  
  if (!items[idx]){
    items[idx] = {};
  } 
  
  items[idx][key] = value;
})

This will yield you something with a structure like

{
  "0": {
    "key1": "data"
    "key2": "data:
  },
  "1": {
    "key1": "data"
    "key2": "data"
  }
}

If you need it to end up an array, it would be pretty easy to convert, but keeping it as an object with numeric strings for keys will prevent an error if it's not sequential.

Also, note there's no error checking or anything here, so if you're going to have query string params that aren't in that format, you'll want to test for that and handle them differently.

Answered By - hobberwickey