CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httprest
yegle
yegle

Reputation: 5875

What's the most REST way to update resources matching some requirements?

I want to do something more REST like this:

Select resources whose field1 equals foo, and update field1 to bar

UPDATE XXX SET field1 = "bar" WHERE field1="foo"

Two solutions as I can see:

  1. GET items matching my requirement, then PUT to update them. Maybe with Etag or If-Match to guarantee it's atomic.
  2. Write a customized PUT method handler, so the query string represent the WHERE clause in the SQL and the content of the PUT request represent the SET clause in SQL

Personally I prefer the latter solution, but in REST, the PUT method is supposed to overwrite a resource, not many resources at a time, nor just updating some fields of the resource.

I also checked the HTTP PATCH method proposal. It makes "updating some fields of a resource" possible, but it's not used to update many resources at once too.

So what's your solution? I'd like to see your best practice :-)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 105

Answers (1)

7zark7
7zark7

Reputation: 10145

Random untested ideas:

 url: PUT /xxx/*/field1/foo
 body: "bar"

or (if you can predict/bound the key range for XXX):

PUT /xxx/0,9999999/field1/foo
"bar"

or if you are okay with 2 calls, maybe:

GET /xxx?field1="foo"
POST /xxx/id1,id2,...,idn/field1
"bar"

Upvotes: 1

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