Inter-parameter Constraints in Contemporary Web APIs

Oostvogels, Nathalie; Koster, Joeri De; Meuter, Wolfgang De

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-60131-1_18

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Moreover, most of the constraints in the wild are not complex, and only 4% of the dependencies in REST APIs are classified as complex [3]. In less expansive studies, Oostvogels [2] and Wu et al [5] report comparable numbers.…”

Section: Related Work a Api Usability And Constraints In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Oostvogels [2] describes three categories of constraints in APIs: (i) exactly one of a set of parameters must be present, (ii) the presence or value of one parameter depends on the presence or value of another parameter, (iii) a group of parameters should either all be present or not present. These three categories are types of inter-parameter constraints, as they describe a requirement on the presence or value of a parameter based on the presence or value of another parameter (e.g., if "country" is NL, then "payment method" should be "iDeal").…”

Section: Related Work a Api Usability And Constraints In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first step, we collect information about the parameters for the endpoints of a Web API from the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) 2 . More specifically, we extract the data type of each parameter, whether the parameter is required, any enum values, their description, and parent-and subparameters.…”

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Web APIs commonly provide an API reference [1], which describes what operations are available through which endpoint and which parameters are required or optional for requests to these endpoints. However, these parameters are not always just required or optional: whether they are required can depend on the presence or value of another parameter [2,3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Automatically Identifying Parameter Constraints in Complex Web APIs: A Case Study at Adyen

Grent¹,

Akimov²,

Aniche

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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Web APIs may have constraints on parameters, such that not all parameters are either always required or always optional. Moreover, the presence or value of one parameter could cause another parameter to be required, or parameters could have restrictions on what kinds of values are valid. Having a clear overview of the constraints helps API consumers to integrate without the need for additional support and with fewer integration faults.We made use of existing documentation and code analysis approaches for identifying parameter constraints in complex web APIs. In this paper, we report our case study of several APIs at Adyen, a large-scale payment company that offers complex Web APIs to its customers. Our results show that the documentationand code-based approach can identify 23% and 53% of the constraints respectively and, when combined, 68% of them. We also reflect on the current challenges that these approaches face. In particular, the absence of information that explicitly describes the constraints in the documentation (in the documentation analysis), and the engineering of a sound static code analyser that is sensitive to data-flow, maintains longer parameter references throughout the API's code, and that is able to symbolically execute the several libraries and frameworks used by the API (in the static analysis).Index Terms-software engineering, web APIs, parameter constraints inference.

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Section: Related Work a Api Usability And Constraints In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Work a Api Usability And Constraints In Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Automatically Identifying Parameter Constraints in Complex Web APIs: A Case Study at Adyen

Grent¹,

Akimov²,

Aniche

2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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show abstract

“…As a part of their work, they studied four popular web APIs and classified the dependencies found into six types, four of which are specific instances of the Requires dependency presented in our work. Oostvogels et al [33] proposed a DSL for the description of inter-parameter constraints in OAS. They first classified dependencies into three types: exclusive (called OnlyOne in our work), dependent (Requires in our work), and group constraints (AllOrNone in our paper).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specification and Automated Analysis of Inter-Parameter Dependencies in Web APIs

Martin-Lopez¹,

Segura²,

Müller³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Web services often impose inter-parameter dependencies that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service. Unfortunately, current specification languages for web services like the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) provide no support for the formal description of such dependencies, which makes it hardly possible to automatically discover and interact with services without human intervention. In this article, we present an approach for the specification and automated analysis of inter-parameter dependencies in web APIs. We first present a domain-specific language, called Inter-parameter Dependency Language (IDL), for the specification of dependencies among input parameters in web services. Then, we propose a mapping to translate an IDL document into a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), enabling the automated analysis of IDL specifications using standard CSP-based reasoning operations. Specifically, we present a catalogue of nine analysis operations on IDL documents allowing to compute, for example, whether a given request satisfies all the dependencies of the service. Finally, we present a tool suite including an editor, a parser, an OAS extension, a constraint programming-aided library, and a test suite supporting IDL specifications and their analyses. Together, these contributions pave the way for a new range of specification-driven applications in areas such as code generation and testing.

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A Catalogue of Inter-parameter Dependencies in RESTful Web APIs

Martin-Lopez

Segura

Ruiz–Cortés

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Web services often impose dependency constraints that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service. Unfortunately, current specification languages for web services like the OpenAPI Specification provide no support for the formal description of such dependencies, which makes it hardly possible to automatically discover and interact with services without human intervention. Researchers and practitioners are openly requesting support for modelling and validating dependencies among input parameters in web APIs, but this is not possible unless we share a deep understanding of how dependencies emerge in practice-the aim of this work. In this paper, we present a thorough study on the presence of dependency constraints among input parameters in web APIs in industry. The study is based on a review of more than 2.5K operations from 40 real-world RESTful APIs from multiple application domains. Overall, our findings show that input dependencies are the norm, rather than the exception, with 85% of the reviewed APIs having some kind of dependency among their input parameters. As the main outcome of our study, we present a catalogue of seven types of dependencies consistently found in RESTful web APIs.

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Inter-parameter Constraints in Contemporary Web APIs

Cited by 9 publications

References 4 publications

Automatically Identifying Parameter Constraints in Complex Web APIs: A Case Study at Adyen

Automatically Identifying Parameter Constraints in Complex Web APIs: A Case Study at Adyen

Specification and Automated Analysis of Inter-Parameter Dependencies in Web APIs

A Catalogue of Inter-parameter Dependencies in RESTful Web APIs

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