What REST PUT POST DELETE calls should return by a convention

Question

According to the  REST ideology  what should be in the response body for a PUT POST DELETE requests  What about return codes  Is HTTP OK enough  What is the reason for such conventions  if any    I ve found a good post describing POST PUT differences  POST vs PUT But it still doesn t answer my question

User · Answer

I like Alfonso Tienda responce from HTTP status code for update and delete?

Here are some Tips:

DELETE

200 (if you want send some additional data in the Response) or 204 (recommended).

202 Operation deleted has not been committed yet.

If there's nothing to delete, use 204 or 404 (DELETE operation is idempotent, delete an already deleted item is operation successful, so you can return 204, but it's true that idempotent doesn't necessarily imply the same response)

Other errors:

400 Bad Request (Malformed syntax or a bad query is strange but possible).

401 Unauthorized Authentication failure

403 Forbidden: Authorization failure or invalid Application ID.

405 Not Allowed. Sure.

409 Resource Conflict can be possible in complex systems.

And 501, 502 in case of errors.

PUT

If you're updating an element of a collection

200/204 with the same reasons as DELETE above.

202 if the operation has not been commited yet.

The referenced element doesn't exists:

PUT can be 201 (if you created the element because that is your behaviour)

404 If you don't want to create elements via PUT.

400 Bad Request (Malformed syntax or a bad query more common than in case of DELETE).

401 Unauthorized

403 Forbidden: Authentication failure or invalid Application ID.

405 Not Allowed. Sure.

409 Resource Conflict can be possible in complex systems, as in DELETE.

422 Unprocessable entity It helps to distinguish between a "Bad request" (e.g. malformed XML/JSON) and invalid field values

And 501, 502 in case of errors.

User · Answer

Overall  the conventions are    think like you re just delivering web pages      For a PUT  I d return the same view that you d get if you did a GET immediately after  that would result in a 200  well  assuming the rendering succeeds of course   For a POST  I d do a redirect to the resource created  assuming you re doing a creation operation  if not  just return the results   the code for a successful create is a 201  which is really the only HTTP code for a redirect that isn t in the 300 range   I ve never been happy about what a DELETE should return  my code currently produces an HTTP 204 and an empty body in this case

User · Answer

By the RFC7231 it does not matter and may be empty  How we implement json api standard based solution in the project   post put  outputs object attributes as in get  field filter relations applies the same   delete  data only contains null  for its a representation of missing object   status for standard delete  200

User · Answer

Creating a resource is generally mapped to POST  and that should return the location of the new resource  for example  in a Rails scaffold a CREATE will redirect to the SHOW for the newly created resource   The same approach might make sense for updating  PUT   but that s less of a convention  an update need only indicate success   A delete probably only needs to indicate success as well  if you wanted to redirect  returning the LIST of resources probably makes the most sense   Success can be indicated by HTTP OK  yes   The only hard-and-fast rule in what I ve said above is that a CREATE should return the location of the new resource   That seems like a no-brainer to me  it makes perfect sense that the client will need to be able to access the new item

User · Answer

Forgive the flippancy  but if you are doing REST over HTTP then RFC7231 describes exactly what behaviour is expected from GET  PUT  POST and DELETE     Update  Jul 3  14   The HTTP spec intentionally does not define what is returned from POST or DELETE  The spec only defines what needs to be defined  The rest is left up to the implementer to choose

[rest] What REST PUT/POST/DELETE calls should return by a convention?

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