November 2017
Intermediate to advanced
420 pages
10h 29m
English
Content preview from RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition
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Implementing partial update
When a client changes only one part of the resource, you can optimize the entire update process by allowing the client to send only the modified part to the server, thereby saving the bandwidth and server resources. RFC 5789 proposes a solution for this use case via a new HTTP method called PATCH. To learn more about this RFC, visit https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789. Note that PATCH is not yet officially a part of HTTP/1.1. However, the HTTP protocol allows both the client and the server to implement any new method. Leveraging this flexibility, many vendors have started supporting the HTTP PATCH method.
The PATCH method takes the following form:
PATCH /departments/10 HTTP/1.1 [Description of changes]
The [Description ...