Recently I wrote an article PATCH vs PUT and the PATCH JSON syntax war in which I wrote about PATCH vs PUT HTTP methods and wide argument on the JSON syntax. Quite lot of developers read it (thank you for that), but truth is there was lot of content that I wanted to include but due to size I skipped. So therefore here is follow-up.

In this Article I will cover more taboo topic aspect of PUT, PATCH and overall REST approach of web-frameworks.

If this article is too long for you and you don’t want to read it all, the main point I want to present is that Ruby on Rails developers tend to think that HTTP method POST represents Create and PUT means Update. Well, not really. The CRUD mapping of modern web-frameworks just limits the scope of these HTTP methods for sake of simplicity in code design.

Let me point out that in the previous article I strongly argue for my opinion, while this article is more chilled version. I just want to extend reader’s point of view around REST. I don’t want to change anything, I don’t want to criticise anything, I just want to give web-developers something to think about over the weekend.

PATCH vs PUT vs yours client’s firewall

First allow me to tell you my very own “500-mile problem” like story.

The term “500-mile problem” refers to a hilarious article The case of the 500-mile email. It’s a story of how sys-admin received a bug report that “emails are not being delivered to clients located over 500 miles from server” and it’s probably the best example of how non-deterministic computers really are because they are made by people.

One of our potential clients was trying our platform and he/she reported that he/she is not able to trigger update actions. We tested several browsers from several different locations around the world via VPN and all was working from everywhere.

One of the client sysadmins provided us his machine to do some debugging via remote desktop connection. And he was right, updating some parts of application was not working. We soon discovered that the only part not working was PATCH on a XHR (Ajax) calls. They were responding 405 “Method not Allowed”

We tried everything browser debugging, analyzing headers, rolling back releases. Nothing worked.

Soon we discovered that 405 responses had some headers not coming from our side. It seems to us that the Firewall or nany-software or caching-proxy was blocking the PATCH on Ajax calls for some reason.

So healthy request before the bug was like this:

| Laptop PATCH -> Clients Firewal -> Load Balancer -> Nginx proxy -> Rails app (200 response) |

After the bug:

| Laptop PATCH -> Clients Firewal (405 response) |

To this day we still don’t know why this was happening. I guess it has something to do with the fact that PATCH method was introduced several years later than POST, PUT, GET, DELETE and the client could be using really really old caching server that didn’t know about PATCH method.

Idempotency table from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

So easy solution! Tell the client: “fix your firewall !” …right ?

Well whoever was in a situation that company business rely on every client knows that sometimes this is not an answer.

Long story short we changed the API endpoint from PATCH to PUT in order to not loose the clients.

Luckily for us Rails is treating update action both PUT and PATCH if the config/routes is defined via resources . Therefore the transition was super easy and painless

This does not apply for routes defined via member { patch :custom_update; } but when following Rails best practices there are not many of those.

So why was it happening ?

Originally when we stumble across this problem we’ve done what any good web-developers should do: we’ve started to look for answers before implementing cow-boy solutions.

When no answers could be found we asked for help. I’ve posted question to StackOverflow and to Reddit but several days there was no answer. Therefore we went with the PUT solution and we hopped for the best. And it worked, no issues were reported.

Then finally out of nowhere Redit user 1110101010 shed light on the problem few weeks later.

I will try to summarize the arguments in this post but I do recommend to read the entire discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/rest/comments/5gkvba/patch_blocked_by_firewall/

For the first part I will just copy entire user 1110101010 explanation as he covered it really well:

Methods HEAD, GET, POST were introduced in HTTP/1.0.

Methods OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, CONNECT were introduced in HTTP/1.1.

PATCH is an odd beast as it was added later, separate from those specs, and its definition is as imprecise and generic as the one we can see for POST in either spec. While the HTTP has since been rewritten in a new set of modular RFCs, it’s very easy to see how certain clients, intermediaries and servers might refuse to process PATCH requests, and they’d still be following the original HTTP/1.1 RFC correctly. The only reason we use HTTP to communicate with APIs is because it’s ubiquitous, not because it’s a marvel of engineering, if we have to be honest. Considering PATCH doesn’t truly offer any objective benefits to POST in terms of semantics, and the distinction between POST and PATCH can be at best argued to be a matter of fuzzy convention, its use would be hard to justify from an engineering point of view It’s not coincidental that while HTTP keeps adding methods, HTML still only supports forms that cover HTTP/1.0 (i.e. GET and POST, and the implied HEAD request for facilitating some levels of GET response caches). My recommendation is to stick to these as well, for widest compatibility.

PUT is not there to replace PATCH !

Next wave of discussion was about the my decision to use PUT to replace the PATCH functionality.

I’m hoping you’ve read the previous article PATCH vs PUT and the PATCH JSON syntax war where I’m explaining what is idempotency or you know what is idempotency difference of PUT vs PATCH. If no please do so otherwise the next part will not make much sense.

In short let me quote user 1110101010:

PUT is intended to replace a full resource, and be idempotent. While it’s not out of the question, I doubt your PATCH match those semantics. This can have an actual implication if an intermediary decides to resend a PUT command to your server.

Basically point is that although our Rails applications is able to replace PATCH with PUT with no effect, on networking level there may be devices/routers that will fully respect the HTTP specification and may try to resend your PUT requests if they suspect that PUT failed.

So an intermediary sees “PUT” and decides “I’m not getting a response, so this means I can re-send, as PUT is idempotent”. The intermediary is simply following HTTP, according to spec.

So the counter argument may be: "big deal, so we will update resource with same information twice"

Well depends what you are doing.

If your “PUT #update” action is just replacing attribute values on a record it may be no big deal.

If your PUT controller action is incrementing counter (e.g. likes) then you may end up with +2 likes instead of +1 like

# request_sent_at | request | db val | # 2016-12-11 23:43:02 | PUT /inc_likes | 1 | incremented, just response got lost # 2016-12-11 23:43:02 | router retry | 2 | incremented, just response got lost # 2016-12-11 23:43:03 | router retry | 3 | 200/204(Success)

Well to be honest this may be overexagguration in Ruby on Rails case because if you’re submitting Form rendered with rails form_for it will include CSRF token (read more) that is there to protect the same form being submitted several times.

But CSRF token is there not to ensure PUT will not misbehave but for protecting you from attacks.

Truth is that lot of time I see junior Rails developers disable the protect_from_forgery particular controller action when they have difficulties implementing CSRF header into JavaScript libraries.

Also if you creating an API you will not be able to rely on this option.

So in other words PUT has a reason for existence in HTTP specification. It’s “replacing” or “creating” resource. So although Rails router may treat Controller#update action as both PUT and PATCH avoid writing your forms or AJAX request to use PUT unless you specifically matching the “replace” context.

POST

So back to my story of the PATCH not working. What would be the best practice to solve it from the intermediary device perspective ?

So PATCH is non-idempotent. We should not replace it with PUT as that is idempotent. The only other HTTP method that is there from the beginning and is non-idempotent is POST .

So answer is: I should use POST !

Now hold on ! Isn’t that against REST ? Shouldn’t the POST be used only for creating records ???

That’s exactly what I was originally thinking as well. Rails just applied this HTTP Method mapping to it’s C.R.U.D. model.

# Rails way: #index | GET /items #create | POST /items #show | GET /items/123 #update | PATCH/PUT /items/123 #delete | DELETE /items/123

There is nothing anti REST to map update POST for updating record.

# theretical model: #index | GET /items #create | POST /items #show | GET /items/123 #update | POST /items/123 #delete | DELETE /items/123

To quote restcookbook.com on this:

The HTTP methods POST and PUT aren’t the HTTP equivalent of the CRUD’s create and update. They both serve a different purpose. It’s quite possible, valid and even preferred in some occasions, to use PUT to create resources, or use POST to update resources

Conclusion

So should we rewrite the entire Rails router ?

…Well no.

Rails is Rails because is easily understandable and there are certain conventions like CRUD that may the development experience just pleasure. There is always something that could be done better according to technical best practices but with sacrifice of understandability.

PATCH is perfectly fine ! Don’t let this article discourage you from using it. I just had really bad luck that somehow it was not working with this one client.

I just wanted you to tell you this experience and little bit extend your REST specification vs application framework convention understanding.

Just be aware that PUT is not synonym for PATCH just because Rails behaves this way. Think twice before using PUT in your routes.

Acknowledgement

“PATCH vs PUT vs yours client’s firewall” part of this article is reflecting collective effort of me and my collegues Anas, Luca, Peter, Matt to solve the issue.

Special thanks to Reddit user 1110101010 for helping me understood everything mentioned in this article (discussion)

Resources

Article is second part of article: http://www.eq8.eu/blogs/36-patch-vs-put-and-the-patch-json-syntax-war