HTTP POST and PUT to create or update list of resources rather than single resource

Question

Can I use POST or PUT rest endpoints to create or update list of items? or These should be always deal with single resource object?

URL: POST/cars

request body:
{
 [ {id:car1}, {id:car2}, {id:car3} ]
}

If I pass list of resources to these endpoints, how I can deal with exception scenarios on creating or updating specific a particular item in the resource list?

It is ok to send list of items (rather than single item) to update to PUT endpoint?

could you please take action on your previous question, someone has spent time on it? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75026819/put-http-verb-for-creating-and-updating-a-resource — Vivek Nuna, Jan 06 '23 at 05:54

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 06 '23 at 06:02

0

It's not recommended to use POST or PUT to create a list of resources. Even if you want to update/create a list then you can pass the resource which represents a list.

like the below with a URL like URL: POST/dogs

{
    "id": "dogs",
    "dogs": [{
            "id": "dog1"
        },
        {
            "id": "dog2"
        },
        {
            "id": "dog3"
        }
    ]
}

to update a specific item you could use PATCH and also PUT is to update the entire resource.

answered Jan 06 '23 at 06:02

Vivek Nuna

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May I know the reason for ""id": "dogs" at root level as I'm talking about list of objects. Me too agree "It's not recommended to use POST or PUT to create a list of resources" any consequence of doing it. No RFC saying that these verbs should take single resource at a time. – pingpong2020 Jan 06 '23 at 06:16
@pingpong2020 JSON is a resource and it has an id, this JSON is representing the list here – Vivek Nuna Jan 06 '23 at 06:18

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 06 '23 at 06:33

Can I use POST or PUT rest endpoints to create or update list of items? or These should be always deal with single resource object?

The requests in the HTTP application target a specific resource. But there really aren't any important restrictions on the semantics of the representations that you send, or how many resources the server might create/modify in response to your request.

Consider creating a new entry in a wiki - you type a bunch of information into a web form, and submit a single POST request, and the server copies your information and suddenly there's a new topic page, and a discussion page for that topic, and maybe a history of edits page, and so on.

Or if I had a JSON document that was my shopping list, and I wanted that list to be available on my website, then I could just PUT/POST the entire list as a single document; here you go.

That said, cache invalidation can get complicated. The cache invalidation semantics of HTTP are pretty limited, so if an HTTP request changes many resources that the client has cached locally, you won't have an easy way to signal to a general purpose web cache that they should all be invalidated.

It's not right or wrong -- the cache invalidation rules just a constraint you should think about when you are designing things.

HTTP POST and PUT to create or update list of resources rather than single resource

2 Answers2