Generic vs specific patch formats
Jan Algermissen <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.web.services.rest |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, trying to wrap my head around the implications of using generic patch media types (e.g. json-patch[1]) vs. specific ones, e.g. application/vnd.bigco.customer-patch. Generic JSON patch looks sort of fine, but I can make myself stop feeling it's tunneling out of band knowledge. When the client constructs the patch document, it makes assumptions about the (abstract) structure of the target resource that is essentially out of band knowledge. You might argue, that the client will have learnt the structure from a previous GET... GET /customers/42 Accept: application/vnd.bigco.customer+json 200 Ok Content-Type: application/vnd.bigco.customer+json ETag: "..." ... and that understanding the *specific* media type (and having an ETag) acts as a counter measure for the patch format being generic. Alas ... I am not fully convinced. Thoughts? Jan [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-json-patch