On 2011-06-09, at 15:47 , Daniel Itaboraí wrote: > This is great stuff! > > It would be nice to have some more operations like "increment", "decrement", > "push", "pop", "compare-and-swap", etc. I think error handling should be > better addressed, possibly returning an array of "result" objects (or > something similar). > > Also, I don´t think one should mention idempotency of patches, since they > seem to me inherently state dependent. > > regards, > Daniel
This sort of update seems to be better implemented with update handlers. Even simple cases like decrement can create lots of cases. What to do at 0? Do we support decrement other than one? Do we support decrement of non-integral values? How about the case where the value isn't a number or doesn't exist? All of these cases are easily taken care of by update handlers. We can even write an update handler that calls other update handlers thanks to code-sharing via common-js modules. Now there is debate as to how easy it is to write some of those and if CouchDB should make some of it easier but it's a start on the single document level. (Also, bulk update calls would be interesting but that's another thread.) Now what I see PATCH being useful for is efficiency. It not only allows you to avoid large repetition in payload but could also have slightly better concurrency since one could check the current revision against the request's revision for just the given patches. One could approximate this with an update handler though this might have elegance since it could work out of the box if the specification of JSON PATCH is carefully crafted and implemented. For now it's just interesting though since I think we'll get more milage from update handler improvements. Maybe the future will include PATCH support, maybe not. Brian.
