Re: REST and DELETE?

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Mark Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 5:29 AM, Mike Kelly <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Does it _have_ to contain all the state? The following would work ok,
>> and the important parts of the interaction are still visible:
>>
>> POST /cart/123
>> If-Match: 2930480293842
>> <state>reserve-to-pay</state>
>
> It has to contain all the state if you want the message to reflect the
> intent of the user, yes.  That message is not self-descriptive.

I don't think it's correct to characterise self-descriptiveness in
boolean terms. There's a whole continuum of self-descriptiveness, and
some parts of an interaction do not necessarily need visibility. For
example, if my API requires clients to include headers for their
star-sign, what their favourite episode of Friends is, and rating of
their current happiness levels out of 10.. it's "more
self-descriptive" than your API but not in a useful way, as the
primary purpose of self-descriptive messaging is to enable
intermediate processing. I don't think my example reduces the
intermediate processability of the interaction in a significant way,
so I don't think it's a lot less self-descriptive, and it's definitely
self-descriptive in a useful sense: an invalidating request has been
made altering the state of the /cart/123 resource.

Cheers,
M