In any event, as far as I can tell this is a unique design, so maybe it’s too weird or not properly RESTful? Would love to know of any other patterns designed to solve the problem of supporting arbitrarily-named secondary unique keys. What do you think?
Not that unique. 🙂 And it really has nothing to do with representational state transfer.
This is purely URL design (i.e. purely a server-side concern). So on that note, let’s take a look at the good RFC:
Aside from dot-segments in hierarchical paths, a path segment is considered opaque by the generic syntax. URI-producing applications often use the reserved characters allowed in a segment to delimit scheme-specific or dereference-handler-specific subcomponents. For example, the semicolon (";") and equals ("=") reserved characters are often used to delimit parameters and parameter values applicable to that segment. The com