RESTful atomic update of multiple resources?

Question

Imagine a web-application storing some data-resource with some id which stores three attachment (e.g. pdf) per datum.

The URL scheme is

data/{id}/attachment1
data/{id}/attachment2
data/{id}/attachment3

An RESTful API exists for the attachments providing GET/PUT/DELETE operations implementing CRUD operations on the server side.

Letting the id be 123, I would like to perform an operation where

attachment1 is replaced by a new attachment (such that GET file/123/attachment1 returns the a new attachment)
attachment2 is deleted (such that that GET file/123/attachment2 returns 404)
attachment3 remains unchanged.

The update should be atomic - the complete update is performed by the server or nothing at all.

Applying a simple PUT file/123/attachment1 and DELETE file/123/attachment2 is not atomic, since the client could crash after the PUT and the server has no hint that he should do a rollback in this case.

So how do I implement the operation in a RESTful way?

I've thought of two solutions but they both do not seem to be 100% RESTful:

Use PATCH (could be PUT, but PATCH better reflects the semantics of an partial update) with multipart/form-data on data/123: The multipart/form-data is a sequence of entities consisting of a new "application/pdf" associated with the field "attachment1" and something which would represent a null-value to denote deletion of attachment2.

While this ensures atomicity, I doubt this is RESTful since i overload the PATCH method using different parameter lists, which violates the uniform-interface constraint.

Use a resource representing a transaction. I could POST the data id 123 to a transaction-URL which would create a transaction resource representing a copy of the current state of the data-resource stored on the server, e.g. transaction/data/123. Now i can call PUT and DELETE on the attachments of this temporary resource (e.g. DELETE transaction/data/123/attachment2) and communicate the commit of this version of the resource to the server via a PUT on transaction/data/123. This ensures atomicity while a have to implement additional server side logic to deal with multiple clients changing the same resource and crashed clients which never committed.

While this seems to be consistent with REST it seems to violate the contraint of statelessness. The state of the transactional resource is not service state but application state, since every transactional resource is associated with a single client.

I'm kind of stuck here, so any ideas would be helpful, thanks!

The second approach has the benefit of providing a nice history of data changes and might let you skip some logging. — Jasper
@mtsz I'm struggling with this problem right now. I like the answer you selected below, but it seems like a lot of work to create a transaction resource with a short, temporary lifespan. Do you think it would be bad to give the atomic transaction to be performed a name like "switcheroo" and just create a specific web service that performs that transaction? e.g., POST /doSwitcheroo with a body of {fileId: 123} .... This service would have the logic to atomically perform the actions you described above on the file with id 123 — Niko Bellic

Will Hartung Will Hartung · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-06T14:35:37

You want to use the second option, the transaction option.

What you're missing is the creation of the transaction:

POST /transaction

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: /transaction/1234

Now you have a transaction resource that is a first class citizen. You can add to it, delete from it, query to see its current contents, and then finally commit it or delete (i.e. rollback) the transaction.

While the transaction is in progress, it's just another resource. There's no client state here. Anyone can add to this transaction.

When its all done, the server applies the changes all at once using some internal transaction mechanism that's out of scope here.

You can capture things like Etags and if-modified headers in the transaction sub actions so that when they're all applied, you know that something didn't change behind your back.

RESTful atomic update of multiple resources?

4 Answers