James M Snell wrote:
Lisa Dusseault wrote:
Explicit result of POST, section 4.
Are there zero, one or more resources created with a POST? There's a
line at the top of section 4 which says that "POST is used to create a
new, dynamically-named, resource". However, that implies ONE, whereas
with media entries, a POST could create TWO resources. I believe a
successful POST request as described here MUST either result in one or
two resources, never zero, and never 3 or more (in the absence of
extensions).
My assumption: A POST could actually create any number of resources.
For instance, when I POST an entry to my weblog, at least two resources
will be created (the editable entry and the HTML "permalink" page) and
several others will be modified (the collection feed, the blog index
page, archive pages, etc). Similarly, when I POST a media resource, I
would expect that multiple resources could be created. How many
resources are created/modified is up to the server implementation. From
the client's point of view, there are only two resources that are of
immediate concern: the atom:entry and the collection feed. At the very
least, A successful POST should result in the creation of the
atom:entry. No other assumptions can be made beyond that.
Even the assumption that a successful POST results in the creation of an
atom:entry may be false; consider the case of a moderated collection
responding with a "202 Accepted". Hence a successful ("2xx" response
code) POST can very well end up creating no resources whatsoever.
That being said, a successful POST might, on the other hand, create more
than two resources as well. As server could, e.g., automatically convert
image/gif media resource to image/png, making both available.
At least that's the way I see these things.
Regards,
Andreas Sewe
