10 Hateoas Design Patterns

title: HATEOAS Design Patterns for Hypermedia APIs weight: 20 date: 2026-06-28 lastmod: 2026-06-28 description: Learn HATEOAS design patterns including conditional links based on state, pagination with next/prev links, action forms, and embedding related resources for navigable APIs. tags: [api-development, hateoas]

HATEOAS design patterns include conditional links that appear or disappear based on resource state, pagination with prev/next/first/last links, action forms with method and schema hints, and embedded resources for reducing round trips.

```python
def build_order_response(order):
    response = {
        "id": order.id,
        "status": order.status,
        "total": order.total,
        "_links": {"self": {"href": f"/orders/{order.id}"}}
    }

    # Conditional links based on state
    if order.status == "pending":
        response["_links"]["pay"] = {
            "href": f"/orders/{order.id}/payment",
            "method": "POST",
            "schema": {"amount": {"type": "number"}}
        }
        response["_links"]["cancel"] = {
            "href": f"/orders/{order.id}",
            "method": "DELETE"
        }
    elif order.status == "paid":
        response["_links"]["refund"] = {
            "href": f"/orders/{order.id}/refund",
            "method": "POST"
        }
    elif order.status == "shipped":
        response["_links"]["track"] = {
            "href": f"/orders/{order.id}/tracking",
            "method": "GET"
        }

    return response

What's Next

Now learn about Temple payload in Hypermedia APIs and HATEOAS.