5 ms·

They give a good rationale for supporting PATCH, but not for omitting PUT. Not supporting PUT is absolutely a mistake, especially with a schema-less backend. Be

They give a good rationale for supporting PATCH, but not for omitting PUT. Not supporting PUT is absolutely a mistake, especially with a schema-less backend. Being unable to PUT means being unable to set a property as undefined (by PUTting a complete version of the resource without that property). The usual approach with PATCH is to set it to None/null, but then the property is still defined as None instead of removed. (Or, some APIs will remove a property with a None value, but then it is undefined instead of being set to None.) A small but potentially important semantic distinction.

jessaustin 13y ago
Does this corner case really justify dealing with another entire verb? Even if we stipulate that null has a specific meaning for our application that we don't want to screw up, how about empty object, array, or string? ( {}, [], or "" ) Do all of those mean something for, e.g., the "lastname" field?
- johns 13y ago
  It's not the only reason. PUT is the only way to do retryable creates since it's idempotent. Leaving it out is a huge omission.
- gruntmaster9000 13y ago
  PUT is almost functionally identical to a PATCH, so it’s not exactly an entire other verb. It’s also a very standard verb. Using the example from a pull request on Eve ( https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96 https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96 ), what if you want to indicate that the middle name is no longer known? Marking it as null means there isn’t one, not that it is unknown. Sure, for many applications the distinction doesn’t matter. But for plenty, it does. (I just recently had to fix an API’s implementation of PUT that actually was more like a PATCH but needed to be a proper PUT.) And it’s foolish for an API to require knowing a nonstandard way of expressing `undefined` when simply not defining something is the best way to not define it. Eve looks nice, but they really need to justify not supporting PUT, beyond just “PATCH is usually better”.
  - nicola 13y ago
    Hello, thanks for your feedback. PUT is coming to Eve with v0.1.0 (next release).
    - nicola 13y ago
      In fact, it's on the dev branch already.

jessaustin 13y ago

Does this corner case really justify dealing with another entire verb? Even if we stipulate that null has a specific meaning for our application that we don't want to screw up, how about empty object, array, or string? ( {}, [], or "" ) Do all of those mean something for, e.g., the "lastname" field?

johns 13y ago
It's not the only reason. PUT is the only way to do retryable creates since it's idempotent. Leaving it out is a huge omission.
gruntmaster9000 13y ago
PUT is almost functionally identical to a PATCH, so it’s not exactly an entire other verb. It’s also a very standard verb. Using the example from a pull request on Eve ( https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96 https://github.com/nicolaiarocci/eve/issues/96 ), what if you want to indicate that the middle name is no longer known? Marking it as null means there isn’t one, not that it is unknown. Sure, for many applications the distinction doesn’t matter. But for plenty, it does. (I just recently had to fix an API’s implementation of PUT that actually was more like a PATCH but needed to be a proper PUT.) And it’s foolish for an API to require knowing a nonstandard way of expressing `undefined` when simply not defining something is the best way to not define it. Eve looks nice, but they really need to justify not supporting PUT, beyond just “PATCH is usually better”.
- nicola 13y ago
  Hello, thanks for your feedback. PUT is coming to Eve with v0.1.0 (next release).
  - nicola 13y ago
    In fact, it's on the dev branch already.