Hacker News Reader

how would you differentiate a direct CRUD route with one that performs a lot of additional things?

PATCH /orders/123 shipped=1

what does this do? does it simply set a field or does it trigger a shipOrder() sequence that also sets that field? what if you need the ability to do both (eg: admin interface & customer frontend)?

I understand that in this case you can instead do something like:

POST /shipments order=123

but not everything has a record backing it that would yield to this pattern. the response to a POST is supposed to be a Location header of the created record, so in fact you do need some form of URI and record for the created shipment.

HTTP REST's multi-item and hierarchical item management are also very hacked-in and necessarily too chatty. You cannot return multiple Locations in a header, for example, when multiple records are created. Strict adherence to the purity of HTTP verbs and limits quickly degenerates into custom hackery above and beyond the RFCs for anything mildly complex.

View on HN

The action performed by the POST method might not result in a resource that can be identified by a URI. In this case, either 200 (OK) or 204 (No Content) is the appropriate response status, depending on whether or not the response includes an entity that describes the result.

10.2.2 201 Created The request has been fulfilled and resulted in a new resource being created. The newly created resource can be referenced by the URI(s) returned in the entity of the response, with the most specific URI for the resource given by a Location header field. The response SHOULD include an entity containing a list of resource characteristics and location(s) from which the user or user agent can choose the one most appropriate.