Using HTTP 304 in response to POST

http rest post http-post http-status-code-304
IronDuck picture IronDuck · Nov 18, 2013 · Viewed 11.5k times · Source

I have a REST API that allows modification of resources using HTTP POST. It's possible that a client may submit a POST request that results in no modification of the resource. I'm thinking about using the 304 response generally used for conditional responses to indicate that the request had no effect. I haven't been able to find any examples of this being done, so I figured I'd ask here and see if anyone else is doing this or has an opinion about it.

Answer

IronDuck picture IronDuck · Nov 22, 2013

After some consideration, I've decided to stick to a normal 200 response with the unchanged resource entity. My initial intent was to provide a concise way to indicate to the client that the resource was not modified. As I thought more about it I realized that in order to do anything useful with the 304 response, they would have to already have a cached version and in that case it would be trivial to compare the version of the cached copy with the version returned in a 200 response.

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