Configuring REST Web Services

A REST web service configuration consists of a URL path, which can contain wildcards, and optional attributes.

The URL path shows what request URLs the service configuration will apply to. The path can include the wildcard characters "?", which matches any single character in a path element, and "*", which matches zero or more characters in a path element. A path element is one part of the URL path; it ends at the next slash ("/") or other special character, or at the end of the URL. If the URL of an HTTP request matches more than one web service configuration, the best (closest) matching service configuration will be used. For example, if you have service configurations /abc/* and /abc/d*, a request for /abc/xyz will use the former configuration, but one for /abc/def will use the latter. Because wildcards only apply within a path element, neither of those configurations would match /abc/def/g. If an HTTP request doesn't match any of your service configurations, it is rejected with an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) error.

Options you can set for a REST web service configuration include:

• Minimum size, maximum size, and encoding of the commarea. The minimum size is useful when the server program may generate a response that's longer than the request.
• Additional HTTP headers for the response. This is particularly useful when invoking CICS REST web services from web pages using Javascript, as explained in the topic Configuring REST Web Services for AJAX.

For more information, see To Configure a REST Web Service.