API response standardization and future proofing

[Alrighttt]

Description

Enforcing a policy returning a JSON object for all API endpoints would allow for better flexibility in making changes to endpoints in the future.

For example, the response of /api/addresses/<address>/outputs/siacoin is currently JSON serialization of []types.SiacoinElement or [<utxo0>, <utxo1>, <utxo2>]. If we needed to add a field to this endpoint in the future, it would require a breaking change for all apps or clients utilizing this endpoint.

If we use a dedicated type instead:

type utxo_response struct {
    outputs []types.SiacoinElement
}

or

{"outputs": [<utxo0>, <utxo1>, <utxo2>]}

Adding additional fields will not introduce a breaking change for clients. Older clients will be served the same data while ignoring the newly added fields.

Version

No response

What operating system are you running (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04, macOS, Windows 11)?

No response

Anything else?

No response

[ChrisSchinnerl]

Thank you for your message! We are considering adding a policy like that in the future when we formalize our engineering guidelines and for new endpoints. However, we don't want to break our existing API for the sake of hopefully not breaking it in the future right now.