Are PUT and POST requests required/expected to have a request body?

http rest post httpwebrequest put
João Pinto Jerónimo picture João Pinto Jerónimo · Sep 6, 2011 · Viewed 30.1k times · Source

I'm writting a RESTful api, and at I'm thinking about the process of a user creating a key. I have the following possibilities:

  • GET request to /new/<keyname> - although it's very easy I think I won't use this, because I heard GET is for retrieving and/or listing information;
  • POST request to /<keyname> - This seemed to me easy and simple enough, but does not pass any data in the request body. Can I do it this way ? Is this weird ?
  • POST request to /keys passing in the request body "keyname=SomeKey" - Is this the correct way ?

I looked at this API from joyent and in all their PUT and POST requests they pass some data in the request body. Is this expected ? Is it really wrong not to require a request body in a PUT and POST request ?

Answer

Darrel Miller picture Darrel Miller · Sep 6, 2011

I asked this question on the Http-WG. This was the most precise answer I got http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2010JulSep/0276.html

In summary, POST does not require a body. I would expect the same justification can be applied to PUT.

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