I have looked at many articles regarding REST and its design implementation for an API. I have a couple of questions however, and maybe they are simply opinionated as there is no "one fits all solution" to REST or API development in general.
Note that these questions are in regards to contacting and receiving requests from an SDK.
My questions are both in regards to the URI form, as I believe it is called. I have seen this represented in a few ways, but my big concern is about versioning and "dynamic" sections.
For my first question (version'ing) I have seen the following approached used often.
/customers/accounts/V3.4/customer_id/1234
/customers/accounts/V3.5/customer_id/1234
Developers would implement this by keeping a general version class, and as they make calls it would grab whatever version the developer has setup. So if they ever wanted to move up to a new API version they would just have to modify the V#.# in one location. I am wondering how good of an this idea is in practice, especially for an SDK. My general thoughts are that this is OK. I believe this as versions are clearly pointed out. If a change needs to be made it is simply a matter of updating your version's call. With an SDK in mind, using an old API won't break anything as if they do not update for awhile then their API request will still be fine, but will route through an older endpoint.
Question 1. Is version'ing using the approach above okay for API updates? Pro's/Cons?
The second question about dynamic values can be seen as follows.
/customers/V4.3/{customer_id}/account
versus
/customers/accounts/V3.4/customer_id/1234
I am not sure if there is a better trade-off to having dynamic endpoints versus hard coding them as listed above. I say this because what if we have a scenario where we wish to add details to the "account" page.
In the above example customers/V4.3 would not have to be updated, as it still contains the same user list midpoint. We would be able to update the account API without causing a version change. (forgive me if that is a terrible idea). But with the second option we would have to update the versioning as that is a midpoint
Question 2. In the example above, is it better to focus on more static or dynamic endpoints?
Still very new to learning about this, forgive me if I made some bad assumptions or conclusions on API design.