以RESTful方式更新多个项目

Question

What should be the correct RESTful approach when trying to update/delete more than one item?

Typical example: There is a list of items, the income folder of mails received, where you can select a group of them by setting the appropiate checkboxes. Then you click in the "delete" button and send the petition of delete them. What method should I call? What parameters?

In this case it's pretty obvious I should use a DELETE , but it only works with one item at once. Also, I might not want to delete them, but storing them in a different folder, which might imply using a PATCH , but then again, the PATCH method only allows one item.

Answer 1

In this case it's pretty obvious I should use a DELETE, but it only works with one item at once. Also, I might not want to delete them, but storing them in a different folder, which might imply using a PATCH, but then again, the PATCH method only allows one item.

You should PATCH the collection (or a part of it) and not the item. For example by moving items, you could use PATCH /collection/?filter=x {location: newDir} . The DELETE is a tricky question. You can use the PATCH or an alternative to use the DELETE /collection/?filter=x , but that implies that you want to delete the collection resource instead of removing item resources from it. By batch creation I think using the POST /collection/ [item1, item2, ...] is okay.

Ofc. you can use alternative URI structues too, for example PATCH /books/1+2+3/ {price: 20, currency: "EUR"} . There is an alternative syntax for PATCH too, in that you add the operation name to the body, for example PATCH /collection/?filter=x {op: "update", location: newDir} . I don't like that, but if you want to reuse PATCH with the same URI, then it can become handy. Another alternative to send the request to a single batch endpoint eg POST /transactions/ and use a multipart HTTP request.

I think the most important part here to keep in mind, what you are doing is forcing multiple operations into a single transaction. So if you don't need immediate consistency, and losing connection between requests is not a problem, then the client can send multiple requests parallel or series using a simple loop.

Answer 2

You could use matrix parameters for the delete. Given that the parameters are resource IDs you could use unnamed parameters, so for example a DELETE to https://host.com/messages/1;2;3 would remove messages with IDs 1, 2 and 3.