Re: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-dusseault-http-patch-08.txt]

Am 01.08.2007 um 20:36 schrieb Roy T. Fielding:
> We don't have that problem today with PATCH, AFAIK.  There is no
> reason not to define a 200 response to PATCH as being the same as
> the representation that would have been received in a GET response
> after the patch has been successfully applied.  Remember, we aren't
> forcing the server to return 200 -- the server can choose which
> status is returned.

Since we are defining anyway, I am wondering how this works with  
clients that are not interested in such a response body. The only way  
they could avoid retrieving the body is to close connection.

I imagine as use case clients that edit/add ID tags on a web resource  
and perform a binary patch. Most certainly that will be protected by  
ETags and the client will not be interested in retrieving the quite  
large representation again.

Is it worth considering a way for him to say so, or is closing the  
connection the appropriate behaviour? Imagine someone like flickr...

It sounds like a nice job for a new "Expect" request header. Let's  
say we call this "patched-content":

PATCH /resource/x HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Expect: patched-content
Content-Type: ...

HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation failed
...
<html><body>Sorry, we do not server content on a patch.</body></html>


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Stefan Eissing

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Received on Thursday, 2 August 2007 08:03:54 UTC