Often, I get questions about embedding resources with HAL http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html. Here is some of my recommendation illustrated on an example.
First of all, think of the _embedded
as a courtesy of HAL so the API user does not have to make one more call to retrieve a resource that has a link relation with the current (self resource). Let's illustrate it on an example: A collection of applications and one application, where an application might have related, child applications. The link relations are as follow:
collection of applications
resource ——application
relation——> application
resource
application
resource ——child
relation——> application
resource