pdnsutil/API: Add unique IDs to everything

[TCB13]

Hello,

This isn't a bug report, this is just something that crosses my mind every single time I use the API or pdnsutil:

Why can't we have unique IDs for records exposed in the API? And modify / delete records using them? Also the API would be way more RESTful.

The current approach works however:

1. It makes it hard sometimes to deal with duplications and whatnot;
2. Sometimes forces people into building middleware systems that keep a separate database that hold a copy of all records just so you can have proper IDs and expose things as true REST... > this isn't good from a performance / complexity standpoint and becomes problematic when the PDNS API simply doesn't deal well with large number of sequential requests.

Exposing the unique ID of records on the API would make everyone's life easier. Why can't the API simply print out the ID column of the records table and/or use it?

Thank you.

[Habbie]

We made a deliberate choice to identify everything by name where possible. We felt this would actually make for a cleaner API. While we have no plans to change this, I am curious about your points (1) and (2) - and perhaps we can think about smaller changes that would make your life easier. Can you tell us more about the problems you run into with the current API? What's the problem with duplication?

[TCB13]

So you suggestion is something like:

GET /api/v1/servers/localhost/zones/example.org./test.example.org

That would return an rsset with the name = test.example.org. Is that it?

That would be useful, however the main "issue" still remains, in order to remove a record from an rsset I've to fetch it, compute what needs to be removed and then issue a REPLACE query. This is why an ID for each record would make things easier.

It would also be nice to see DELETE with the same logic:

DELETE /api/v1/servers/localhost/zones/example.org./test.example.org

So we could delete entire rssets without having to specify a type.

[Habbie]

if you don't specify a type, it's not an RRset - it's all RRsets for a name

[TCB13]

Okay that's fair but what about the records inside an rsset? Anwyays, what's the logic behind the concept of an RRset? Why not simply have records?

[klaus-nicat]

For example all RRs of an RRset must have the same TTL. So there are properties which are common for the whole RRset.

[TCB13]

Why not simply just have records? I don't see the benefit, just extra overhead and extra steps to get things into the API. Even when we look at the MySQL database there's no concept of RRsets, just records...

[klaus-nicat]

Do you want the ID only for deleting? Or also for updating a single RR of a RRset? And do you also want to add single RRs to an existing RRset?

[TCB13]

It would be good to have a way / ID to delete and update both the RRsets and the records inside them.