How Twitter Handles Sorting For Their API

I was looking into some of the common approaches by API providers for sorting of data in API responses. I’m not in the business of finding the right answer, I am in the business of finding successful examples from APIs(brands) that people are familiar with–I thought Twitter’s page in their API documentation dedicated to sorting was worth noting.

When you craft your Twitter API request you just append sort_by=[attribute name]-[asc/desc] where the attribute is a valid attribute that is returned in the JSON of your GET request. An example of this is using ?name-asc to sort by name alphabetically or ?name-desc to sort in reverse. Providing a pretty basic approach that API providers can consider when designing sort functionality in their API.

I’ll be documenting all the approaches I find from known providers, developing a catalog of options for a variety of use cases. I’ll also spend some time looking at how GraphQL tackles the problem, providing a much more holistic approach to managing data using APIs. When I go through my API design checklist each round, I like adding a variety of diverse tooling to it, based upon examples I find from the strongest API providers. Healthy diversity in your API toolbox will be increasingly important to assist in tackling a variety of data, content, or algorithmic challenges.