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> I read 'idempotent' as implying that result sets don't change over time Idempotent means the request itself doesn't change stuff, it doesn't mean something e
by himinlomax 5y ago
> I read 'idempotent' as implying that result sets don't change over time
Idempotent means the request itself doesn't change stuff, it doesn't mean something else won't.
- mjb 5y agoYou're right, and I was fuzzy about what I meant. I didn't mean (although wasn't clear) that QUERY would have to return the whole result set over time - clearly that's beyond the scope of HTTP's definition of idempotency. However, because of the existence of isolation and locking concerns in databases, even fairly simple queries are not idempotent. RFC2616 goes to some effort to (fuzzily, unfortunately) talk about sequences of operations, which would be useful here.