Comment by afavour
12 hours ago
Is caching not the primary reason to use this over POST? You should never want to cache POST requests.
12 hours ago
Is caching not the primary reason to use this over POST? You should never want to cache POST requests.
No. Being idempotent, it also lets the browser/client/reverse proxy retry it if it fails.
Technically a put or a patch is also idempotent. The benefits are idempotent and safe (and semantically appropriate). Post (generally) communicates something is changing whereas a query doesn't
PUT is idempotent, PATCH is not always. The semantics of a PATCH payload are up to the server and standards like JSON Patch (RFC 6902, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6902) allow non-idempotent operations like adding an item to a list.