The NAS Bridge management API is based on RESTful web services. Representational State Transfer (REST) establishes guidelines for exposing server-based resources. It provides a flexible and extensible foundation for managing the NAS Bridge.
Every system uses and maintains resources. A resource can be a file, business information, a process, or an administrative entity.
Resources are always in one of a finite number of states. The operations used to change states must be clearly defined.
Messages are exchanged between the client and server to access and change the state of resources according to the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol used by web services to exchange messages about resources. During HTTP message exchanges, the HTTP verbs are mapped to the resources and their corresponding state management actions.
The NAS Bridge management API relies on a subset of HTTP and uses the following HTTP verbs:
HTTP is stateless. Therefore, to associate a set of related requests and responses under one identity, additional information must be added to the data flows, including HTTP headers or cookies. Also note that HTTP uses TCP port 80 by default.
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are used to specify the endpoints where resources are located. URIs provide the general framework for creating unique resource names. The resources are exposed in a structure that is similar to a hierarchical directory.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a type of URI adapted primarily for the web and used in RESTful web services. A URL is used to identify a resource and to access a representation of the resource.
While there are several possible ways that information can be transferred between a web client and server, the most popular option is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is a standard for representing simple data structures, including objects and arrays, in plain text. JSON is used by the NAS Bridge RESTful web services to represent and transfer state information describing each resource.
If you want to upload a file using the API, such as a NAS Bridge recovery package, you must perform a POST with the multi-part content type. Otherwise, the file will not upload.