You're exposing an API in both cases. In one case, your API returns HTML, in the other case, it returns (presumably) JSON. The format of the response doesn't ha

You're exposing an API in both cases. In one case, your API returns HTML, in the other case, it returns (presumably) JSON. The format of the response doesn't have to have any bearing on what SQL queries you write or what permissions you check - you can implement the data fetching exactly the same way for both cases.