Hi Jim,

can you provide an example representation for the mutable/immutable
use case?

Jan

On Jul 1, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Jim Edwards-Hewitt wrote:

> Hi, everyone,
>
> I'm a newbie here (though not to REST in general), and the list
> archives have been a great help in clarifying my understanding of a
> lot of REST concepts and suggesting good design elements. I have one
> part of my design right now where I'm unsure what a good RESTful
> approach would be.
>
> I have resources that support GET and PUT, but contain some parts
> that clients are not allowed to modify. (This doesn't seem like an
> uncommon case; I would think that navigation links, for example,
> would typically not be modifiable in a PUT.) So is it better to:
>
> 1. Require clients to submit all the read-only parts unmodified in a
> PUT, and respond with an error code if they are absent or altered?
> 2. Take advantage of the leniency allowed in a server's
> implementation of PUT to ignore the read-only elements (or their
> absence)?
> 3. Separate read-only elements into a sub-resource that only
> supports GET? (This may not be feasible for resources which must be
> created as a whole.)
>
> or something else?
>
> Second, there are some elements that are modifiable or not depending
> on the privileges held by the (authenticated) user. I would think
> this would be expressed by a difference in the representation
> returned to the client, but what should that difference be? (My
> representations are XML documents, if there isn't a more general
> solution.)
>
> And in a broader sense, I'd like the client to know which elements
> of the resource the user can modify, for presentation purposes. Is
> there a generally accepted way to do this, perhaps with form
> templates or XForms?
>
> I'd be interested in any comments or alternative approaches, if I'm
> just looking at it from the wrong angle.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -- Jim
>
>
>
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