Re: Modeling conditional update based on existence of a dependent resource

Mike Kelly <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.services.rest
Message-ID <CANqiZJbTJ4AQJaqJX0rcCtDNxgkHujCXTGKaK6c8MSzFuRS1Jw@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Dan Haywood
<[email protected]>wrote:

> **
>
>
>
>
> On 3 July 2012 12:38, Mike Kelly <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> **
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Shaunak Kashyap <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> **
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Using HTTP, if resource A exists, I would like PUT /uri/for/resource/B
>>> to succeed. If resource B does not exist, I would like the same PUT request
>>> to fail, responding with a status code that indicates to the client that
>>> resource A does not exist. So what is a good status code to respond with in
>>> the failure case?
>>>
>>
>> Would 404 not suffice here?
>>
>>
>
> But the resource being put to DOES exist, so 404 doesn't make sense.
>

The second sentence starts with "If resource B does not exist", am I
missing something?


>
> To me it's more like a validation error, so consider 422 ("unprocesssable
> entity").
>
>
If 404 really isn't right then 409 Conflict is probably the next best
option in this case.

Cheers,
M
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