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Versions: 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 RFC 5789
Network Working Group L. Dusseault
Internet-Draft Linden Lab
Intended status: Standards Track J. Snell
Expires: May 29, 2010 November 25, 2009
PATCH Method for HTTP
draft-dusseault-http-patch-16
Abstract
Several applications extending the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
require a feature to do partial resource modification. The existing
HTTP PUT method only allows a complete replacement of a document.
This proposal adds a new HTTP method, PATCH, to modify an existing
HTTP resource.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
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This Internet-Draft will expire on May 29, 2010.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2009 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
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publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The PATCH Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. A simple PATCH example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2. Error handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Advertising Support in OPTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. The Accept-Patch Header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. Example OPTIONS Request and Response . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.1. The 'Accept-Patch' Response Header . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix B. Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
B.1. Changes from -00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
B.2. Changes from -01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
B.3. Changes from -02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
B.4. Changes from -03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
B.5. Changes from -04 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
B.6. Changes from -05 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
B.7. Changes from -06 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
B.8. Changes from -07 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
B.9. Changes from -08 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
B.10. Changes from -09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
B.11. Changes from -10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
B.12. Changes from -11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
B.13. Changes from -12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
B.14. Changes from -13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
B.15. Changes from -14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
B.16. Changes from -15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Appendix C. Notes to RFC Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
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1. Introduction
This specification defines the new HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616] method PATCH
that is used to apply partial modifications to a resource.
A new method is necessary to improve interoperability and prevent
errors. The PUT method is already defined to overwrite a resource
with a complete new body, and can not be reused to do partial
changes. Otherwise, proxies and caches and even clients and servers
may get confused as to the result of the operation. POST is already
used but without broad interoperability (for one, there is no
standard way to discover patch format support). PATCH was mentioned
in earlier HTTP specifications, but not completely defined.
In this document, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED",
"SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY",
and "OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
Furthermore, this document uses the ABNF syntax defined in Section
2.1 of [RFC2616].
2. The PATCH Method
The PATCH method requests that a set of changes described in the
request entity be applied to the resource identified by the Request-
URI. The set of changes is represented in a format called a "patch
document" identified by a media type. If the Request-URI does not
point to an existing resource, the server MAY create a new resource,
depending on the patch document type (whether it can logically modify
a null resource) and permissions etc.
The difference between the PUT and PATCH requests is reflected in the
way the server processes the enclosed entity to modify the resource
identified by the Request-URI. In a PUT request, the enclosed entity
is considered to be a modified version of the resource stored on the
origin server and the client is requesting that the stored version be
replaced. With PATCH, however, the enclosed entity contains a set of
instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the
origin server should be modified to produce a new version. The PATCH
method affects the resource identified by the Request-URI, and also
MAY have side effects on other resources; i.e., new resources may be
created, or existing ones modified, by the application of a PATCH.
PATCH is neither safe or idempotent as defined by [RFC2616], Section
9.1.
A PATCH request can be issued in such a way as to be idempotent,
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which also helps prevent bad outcomes from collisions between two
PATCH requests on the same resource in a similar timeframe.
Collisions from multiple PATCH requests may be more dangerous than
PUT collisions, because some patch formats need to operate from a
known base point or else corrupt the resource. Clients using this
kind of patch application SHOULD acquire a strong ETag [RFC2616] for
the resource to be modified, and use that ETag in the If-Match header
on the PATCH request to verify that the resource is still unchanged.
If a strong ETag is not available for a given resource, the client
can use If-Unmodified-Since as a less-reliable safeguard.
There are also cases where patch formats do not need to operate from
a known base-point (e.g. appending text lines to log files, or non-
colliding rows to database tables), in which case the same care in
client requests is not needed.
The server MUST apply the entire set of changes atomically and never
provide (e.g. in response to a GET during this operation) a
partially-modified representation. If the entire patch document
cannot be successfully applied then the server MUST NOT apply any of
the changes. The determination of what constitutes a successful
PATCH can vary depending on the patch document and the type of
resource(s) being modified. For example, the common 'diff' utility
can generate a patch document that applies to multiple files in a
directory hierarchy. The atomicity requirement holds for all
directly affected files. See Error Handling in Section 2.2 for
details on status codes and possible error conditions.
If the request passes through a cache and the Request-URI identifies
one or more currently cached entities, those entries SHOULD be
treated as stale. A response to this method is only cacheable if it
contains explicit freshness information (such as an Expires header or
"Cache-Control: max-age" directive) as well as the Content-Location
header matching the request-URI, indicating that the PATCH response
body is a resource representation. A cached PATCH response can only
be used to respond to subsequent GET and HEAD requests; it MUST NOT
be used to respond to other methods (in particular, PATCH).
Note that entity-headers contained in the request apply only to the
contained patch document and MUST NOT be applied to the resource
being modified. Thus, a Content-Language header could be present on
the request but it would only mean (for whatever that's worth) that
the patch document had a language. Servers SHOULD NOT store such
headers except as trace information, and SHOULD NOT use such header
values the same way they might be used on PUT requests. Therefore,
this document does not specify a way to modify a document's Content-
Type or Content-Language value through headers, though a mechanism
could well be designed to achieve this goal through a patch document.
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There is no guarantee that a resource can be modified with PATCH.
Further, it is expected that different patch document formats will be
appropriate for different types of resources and that no single
format will be appropriate for all types of resources. Therefore,
there is no single default patch document format that implementations
are required to support. Servers MUST ensure that a received patch
document is appropriate for the type of resource identified by the
Request-URI.
Clients need to choose when to use PATCH rather than PUT. For
example, if the patch document size is larger than the size of the
new resource data that would be used in a PUT, then it might make
sense to use PUT instead of PATCH. A comparison to POST is even more
difficult, because POST is used in widely varying ways and can
encompass PUT and PATCH-like operations if the server chooses. If
the operation does not modify the resource identified by the Request-
URI in a predictable way, POST should be considered instead of PATCH
or PUT.
2.1. A simple PATCH example
PATCH /file.txt HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Content-Type: application/example
If-Match: "e0023aa4e"
Content-Length: 100
[description of changes]
This example illustrates use of a hypothetical patch document on an
existing resource. The 204 response code is used because the
response does not have a body (a response with the 200 code would
have a body) but other success codes can be used if appropriate.
Successful PATCH response to existing text file
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Location: /file.txt
ETag: "e0023aa4f"
2.2. Error handling
There are several known conditions under which a PATCH request can
fail.
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Malformed patch document: When the server determines that the patch
document provided by the client is not properly formatted, it
SHOULD return a 400 (Bad Request) response. The definition of
badly formatted depends on the patch document chosen.
Unsupported patch document: Can be specified using a 415
(Unsupported Media Type) when the client sends a patch document
format that the server does not support for the resource
identified by the Request-URI. Such a response SHOULD include an
Accept-Patch response header as described in Section 3.1 to notify
the client what patch document media types are supported.
Unprocessable request: Can be specified with a 422 (Unprocessable
Entity) ([RFC4918], Section 11.2) when the server understands the
patch document and the syntax of the patch document appears valid,
but the server is incapable of processing the request. This might
include attempts to modify a resource in a way that would cause
the resource to become invalid: for instance, a modification to a
well-formed XML document that would cause it to no longer be well-
formed. There may also be more specific errors like "Conflicting
State" that could be signaled with this status code, but the more
specific error would generally be more helpful.
Resource Not Found: Can be specified with a 404 (Not Found) status
code, when the client attempted to apply a patch document to a
non-existent resource, but the patch document chosen cannot be
applied to a non-existent resource.
Conflicting State: Can be specified with a 409 (Conflict) when the
request cannot be applied given the state of the resource. For
example, if the client attempted to apply a structural
modification and the structures assumed to exist did not exist
(with XML, a patch might specify changing element 'foo' to element
'bar' but element 'foo' might not exist).
Conflicting modification: When a client uses either the If-Match or
If-Unmodified-Since header to define a precondition, and that
precondition failed, then the 412 (Precondition Failed) error is
most helpful to the client. However, that response makes no sense
if there was no precondition on the request. In cases when the
server detects a possible conflicting modification and no
precondition was defined in the request, the server can return a
409 (Conflict) response.
Concurrent modification: Some applications of PATCH might require
the server to process requests in the order in which they are
received. If a server is operating under those restrictions, and
it receives concurrent requests to modify the same resource, but
is unable to queue those requests, the server can usefully
indicate this error by using a 409 (Conflict) response.
Note that the 409 Conflict response gives reasonably consistent
information to clients. Depending on the application and the nature
of the patch format, the client might be able to reissue the request
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as is (e.g. an instruction to append a line to a log file), or it
might have to retrieve the resource content to recalculate a patch,
or it might have to fail the operation.
Other HTTP status codes can also be used under the appropriate
circumstances.
The entity body of error responses SHOULD contain enough information
to communicate the nature of the error to the client. The content-
type of the response entity can vary across implementations.
3. Advertising Support in OPTIONS
A server can advertise its support for the PATCH method by adding it
to the listing of allowed methods in the "Allow" OPTIONS response
header defined in HTTP/1.1. The PATCH method MAY appear in the
"Allow" header even if the Accept-Patch header is absent, in which
case the list of allowed patch documents is not advertised.
3.1. The Accept-Patch Header
This specification introduces a new response header "Accept-Patch"
used to specify the patch document formats accepted by the server.
"Accept-Patch" SHOULD appear in the OPTIONS response for any resource
that supports the use of the PATCH method. The presence of the
"Accept-Patch" header in response to any method is an implicit
indication that PATCH is allowed on the resource identified by the
Request-URI. The presence of a specific patch document format in
this header indicates that specific format is allowed on the resource
identified by the Request-URI.
Accept-Patch = "Accept-Patch" ":" 1#media-type
The Accept-Patch header specifies a comma separated listing of media-
types as defined by [RFC2616], Section 3.7.
3.2. Example OPTIONS Request and Response
[request]
OPTIONS /example/buddies.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
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[response]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS, HEAD, DELETE, PATCH
Accept-Patch: application/example, text/example
The examples show a server that supports PATCH generally using two
hypothetical patch document formats.
4. IANA Considerations
4.1. The 'Accept-Patch' Response Header
The 'Accept-Patch' response header should be added to the permanent
registry (see [RFC3864]).
Header field name: Accept-Patch
Applicable Protocol: HTTP
Author/Change controller: IETF
Specification document: this specification
5. Security Considerations
The security considerations for PATCH are nearly identical to the
security considerations for PUT ([RFC2616], Section 9.6). These
include authorizing requests (possibly through access control and/or
authentication) and ensuring that data is not corrupted through
transport errors or through accidental overwrites. Whatever
mechanisms are used for PUT can be used for PATCH as well. The
following considerations apply specially to PATCH.
A document that is patched might be more likely to be corrupted than
a document that is overridden in entirety, but that concern can be
addressed through the use of mechanisms such as conditional requests
using ETags and the If-Match request header as described in
Section 2. If a PATCH request fails, the client can issue a GET
request to the resource to see what state it is in. In some cases,
the client might be able to check the contents of the resource to see
if the PATCH request can be resent, but in other cases the attempt
will just fail and/or a user will have to verify intent. In the case
of a failure of the underlying transport channel, where a PATCH
response is not received before the channel fails or some other
timeout happens, the client might have to issue a GET request to see
whether the request was applied. The client might want to ensure
that the GET request bypasses caches using mechanisms described in
HTTP specifications (see for example Section 13.1.6 of [RFC2616]).
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Sometimes an HTTP intermediary might try to detect viruses being sent
via HTTP by checking the body of the PUT/POST request or GET
response. The PATCH method complicates such watch-keeping because
neither the source document nor the patch document might be a virus,
yet the result could be. This security consideration is not
materially different from those already introduced by byte-range
downloads, downloading patch documents, uploading zipped (compressed)
files and so on.
Individual patch documents will have their own specific security
considerations that will likely vary depending on the types of
resources being patched. The considerations for patched binary
resources, for instance, will be different than those for patched XML
documents. Servers MUST take adequate precautions to ensure that
malicious clients cannot consume excessive server resources (e.g.,
CPU, disk I/O) through the client's use of PATCH.
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.
[RFC3864] Klyne, G., Nottingham, M., and J. Mogul, "Registration
Procedures for Message Header Fields", BCP 90, RFC 3864,
September 2004.
6.2. Informative References
[RFC4918] Dusseault, L., "HTTP Extensions for Web Distributed
Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)", RFC 4918, June 2007.
Appendix A. Acknowledgements
PATCH is not a new concept, it first appeared in HTTP in drafts of
version 1.1 written by Roy Fielding and Henrik Frystyk and also
appears in Section 19.6.1.1 of RFC 2068.
Thanks to Adam Roach, Chris Sharp, Julian Reschke, Geoff Clemm, Scott
Lawrence, Jeffrey Mogul, Roy Fielding, Greg Stein, Jim Luther, Alex
Rousskov, Jamie Lokier, Joe Hildebrand, Mark Nottingham, Michael
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Balloni, Cyrus Daboo, Brian Carpenter, John Klensin, Eliot Lear and
SM for review and advice on this document.
Appendix B. Changes
B.1. Changes from -00
OPTIONS support: removed "Patch" header definition and used Allow and
new "Accept-Patch" headers instead.
Supported delta encodings: removed vcdiff and diffe as these do not
have defined MIME types and did not seem to be strongly desired.
PATCH method definition: Clarified cache behavior.
B.2. Changes from -01
Removed references to XCAP - not yet a RFC.
Fixed use of MIME types (this "fix" now obsolete)
Explained how to use MOVE or COPY in conjunction with PATCH, to
create a new resource based on an existing resource in a different
location.
B.3. Changes from -02
Clarified that MOVE and COPY are really independent of PATCH.
Clarified when an ETag must change, and when Last-Modified must be
used.
Clarified what server should do if both Content-Type and IM headers
appear in PATCH request.
Filled in missing reference to DeltaV and ACL RFCs.
Stopped using 501 Unsupported for unsupported delta encodings.
Clarified what a static resource is.
Refixed use of MIME types for patch formats.
Limited the scope of some restrictions to apply only to usage of
required diff format.
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B.4. Changes from -03
Various typographical, terminology consistency, and other minor
clarifications or fixes.
B.5. Changes from -04
Moved paragraphs on ACL and RFC3229 interoperability to new section.
Added security considerations.
Added IANA considerations, registration of new namespace, and
discontinued use of "DAV:" namespace for new elements.
Added example of error response.
B.6. Changes from -05
Due to various concerns it didn't seem likely the application/gdiff
registration could go through so switching to vcdiff as required diff
format, and to RFC3229's approach to specifying diff formats,
including use of the IM header.
Clarified what header server MUST use to return MD5 hash.
Reverted to using 501 Unsupported for unsupported delta encodings.
B.7. Changes from -06
The reliance on RFC 3229 defined patch documents has been factored
out in favor of delta encodings identified by MIME media type.
The required use of DeltaV-based error reporting has been removed in
favor of using basic HTTP status codes to report error conditions.
The Accept-Patch response header has been redefined as a listing of
media-ranges, similar to the Accept request header.
Added James Snell as a co-author.
B.8. Changes from -07
Terminology change from "delta encoding" to "patch document"
Added clarification on the safety and idempotency of PATCH
Updated the caching rules of PATCH responses
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200 responses MUST include a representation of the modified resource.
204 responses are used to indicate successful response without
returning a representation.
Suggest using 422 Unprocessable Entity to indicate that a properly
formatted patch document cannot be processed
Clarify the use of 412 and 409 to indicate concurrent and conflicting
resource modifications.
Added registration for the Accept-Patch header.
Relaxed the requirements for the use of If-Match and If-Unmodified-
Since.
Add language that clarifies the difference between PUT and PATCH.
Add language that clarifies the issues with PATCH and Content
Negotiation.
Use of Accept-Patch on any response implies that PATCH is supported.
Add language advising caution when pipelining PATCH requests.
B.9. Changes from -08
Addition of the 209 Content Returned status code
Addition of the Prefer header field mechanism
Removed the paragraph discussing the use of 200+Content-Location.
This is replaced by the 209 Content Returned status code.
B.10. Changes from -09
Move the prefer header to a separate document
Restructure the document sections.
B.11. Changes from -10
Remove paragraph about pipelined requests. This is covered
adequately by RFC2616.
Remove paragraph about content negotiation. This is covered
adequately by RFC2616.
Explicitly indicate that PATCH can be used to create new resources.
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Remove recommendation for servers to provide strong etags. This is
recommendation is implied and does not need to be explicitly.
Change Allow-Patch to a listing of media-type and not media-range.
B.12. Changes from -11
Fix section links.
State that this uses RFC2616-style ABNF.
Fix grammar for Accept-Patch.
Remove requirements for handling entity-headers on PATCH and replace
with general discussion of issues and consequences of having no
handling requirements.
Update Security Considerations to make it clear what security
considerations for PUT are, for comparison.
B.13. Changes from -12
Remove status 209 again.
Add security consideration about using too much server resources.
Remove Content-MD5 from example.
B.14. Changes from -13
Remove '*' value from Accept-Patch again.
Allow caching but only if context is clear.
Clarify how some patch formats might allow creating a new document.
Add comparison of PATCH to POST
B.15. Changes from -14
Clarified that Accept-Patch header SHOULD appear in OPTIONS response
-- it is not absolutely required
Clarified how server can indicate that a PATCH response body is
cachable as a resource representation.
Removed suggestion that PATCH side-effects might be specified in the
patch document specification -- this implied that side-effects could
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exclusively be determined that way, but in fact side-effects are
often determined by the server unilaterally.
B.16. Changes from -15
Clarifications on how conflicting PATCH requests can be avoided, and
why not all use cases necessarily involve conflict
Added Content-Location to example response, so the ETag would be
legit
Expanded security considerations on avoiding collisions, recovering
from possible (unknown) collisions
Very slight reordering of paragraphs in section 2, for better flow
Clarified that the concurrent-modification status response is
optional for servers, and explained what clients can do with that
response
Updated text describing conflicting modifications: when 412 is used,
vs 409
Appendix C. Notes to RFC Editor
The RFC Editor should remove this section and the Changes section.
Authors' Addresses
Lisa Dusseault
Linden Lab
945 Battery Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
USA
Email: lisa.dusseault@gmail.com
James M. Snell
Email: jasnell@gmail.com
URI: http://www.snellspace.com
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