Re: [apps-discuss] more feature requests, was: JSON patch: "test" operation

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2011-12-30 15:05, Sam Johnston wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]
> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>
>     On 2011-12-30 12:36, Sam Johnston wrote:
>      > ...
>
>             Of course that depends on how you define the lifetime of a
>         resource.
>             Does a resource which currently doesn't have a retrievable
>             representation "exist"?
>
>             Technically, PATCH can work for creating an initial mapping
>         as well.
>
>         That's a contrived interpretation — is it something we want to
>         support?
>         I'd rather a PATCH throw a 4xx error if a resource didn't
>         exist... an
>         empty PUT would create a resource that could then be PATCHed, no?
>         ...
>
>
>     It probably belongs into the description of the patch format.
>
>
> Agreed.
>
>     I don't see how requiring an empty PUT makes things better, though.
>
>
> It would prevent misplaced PATCHes from creating new resources, while

If you want to do that, you can always add "If-None-Match: *".

> still allowing you to build up a resource from scratch with PATCHes.
> Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I thought that's what standards groups
> were for ;)

:-) As long as being too pedantic doesn't make things more complicated 
than they need to be (I can't recall why we have the prose about 
"existing" resources in the PATCH spec; we definitively discussed this 
use case at some point...)

Best regards, Julian