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Liberator

Handling POST, et al.

There’s more than GET and HEAD requests. To be a useful web library you better support POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE as well, and so does liberator. While there are even more HTTP methods than those, liberator has no out-of-the-box support for them and treats them like GET requests. In any case you need to declare them as known and allowed.

Enabling the methods

The allowed methods are determined by :method-allowed?. The default implementation for this decision uses the resource key :allowed-methods to obtain a list of methods and checks if it matches the request method. When adding more methods to your resource, make sure that the method is declared as known in :known-methods. By default, liberator knows the methods from RFC2616: GET, HEAD, PUT, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, TRACE as well as PATCH from RFC5789 (since version 0.12).

POST

Post requests share a lot of the decision flow with GET requests. The main difference is that you can also reach the handlers :created, :no-content and :see-other. Because post is a non-idempotent method, you can provide a function for the key :post! which is optimal for changing the state on the server. The negotiation of the status code is done afterwards. For the details please refer to the decision graph.

An idiomatic way to support post is the following:

  (def posts (ref []))
  ;;...
  (ANY "/postbox" []
       (resource
        :allowed-methods [:post :get]
        :available-media-types ["text/html"]
        :handle-ok (fn [ctx]
                     (format  (str "<html>Post text/plain to this resource.<br>\n"
                                   "There are %d posts at the moment.</html>")
                              (count @posts)))
        :post! (fn [ctx]
                 (dosync 
                  (let [body (slurp (get-in ctx [:request :body]))
                        id   (count (alter posts conj body))]
                    {::id id})))
        ;; actually http requires absolute urls for redirect but let's
        ;; keep things simple.
        :post-redirect? (fn [ctx] {:location (format "/postbox/%s" (::id ctx))})))

We can extend this example to support conditional request. Thus a client can make sure that the POST is enacted only if no other request was made since it checked the resource:

    (ANY "/cond-postbox" []
       (resource
        :allowed-methods [:post :get]
        :available-media-types ["text/html"]
        :handle-ok (fn [ctx]
                     (format  (str "<html>Post text/plain to this resource.<br>\n"
                                   "There are %d posts at the moment.</html>")
                              (count @posts)))
        :post! (fn [ctx]
                 (dosync 
                  (let [body (slurp (get-in ctx [:request :body]))
                        id   (count (alter posts conj body))]
                    {::id id})))
        ;; actually http requires absolute urls for redirect but let's
        ;; keep things simple.
        :post-redirect? (fn [ctx] {:location (format "/postbox/%s" (::id ctx))})
        :etag (fn [_] (str (count @posts)))))

We also make a little resource to retrieve the posted content again:

    (ANY "/postbox/:x" [x]
       (resource
        :allowed-methods [:get]
        :available-media-types ["text/html"]
        :exists? (fn [ctx] (if-let [d (get @posts (dec (Integer/parseInt x)))] {::data d}))
        :handle-ok ::data))

A quick test with curl shows that we cannot post to a stale resource:

$ curl -i http://localhost:3000/cond-postbox
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:52:45 GMT
Vary: Accept
ETag: "4"
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 76
Server: Jetty(7.6.1.v20120215)

<html>Post text/plain to this resource.<br>
There are 4 posts at the moment.

$ curl -XPOST -d test -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' -H 'If-Match: "4"' -i http://localhost:3000/cond-postbox
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:53:52 GMT
Vary: Accept
Location: /postbox/5
ETag: "5"
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 0
Server: Jetty(7.6.1.v20120215)

$ curl -XPOST -d test -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' -H 'If-Match: "4"' -i http://localhost:3000/cond-postbox
HTTP/1.1 412 Precondition Failed
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:54:04 GMT
ETag: "5"
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 20
Server: Jetty(7.6.1.v20120215)

Precondition failed.

PUT request

The necessary steps to implement handling of PUT are mostly those for POST. A key difference is that :can-put-to-missing? can lead to :conflict? which can send you to :handle-conflict. This is not possible for POST requests. On the other hand PUT to a nonexistent resource does not allow a response that sends you to a different location. The necessary flow can be seen as always on the decision graph.

PATCH request

The PATCH method is similar to PUT except that the entity contains a list of differences between the original version of the resource identified by the Request-URI and the desired content of the resource after the PATCH action has been applied. The list of differences is in a format defined by the media type of the entity (e.g., “application/diff”) and MUST include sufficient information to allow the server to recreate the changes necessary to convert the original version of the resource to the desired version.

A rudimentary way to support patch follows:

  (def content (ref ["Replace part or all of this string."]))
  ;;...
  (ANY "/patchbox" []
       (resource
        :allowed-methods [:patch :get]
        :available-media-types ["text/html"]
        :handle-ok (fn [ctx]
                     (format  (str "<html><body>\n"
                                   "The current content is:<br/>"
                                   (last @content)
                                   "Patch text/plain to this resource.<br/>"
                                   "Send a string in the format foo|bar.<br/>"
                                   "Any instance of the string to the left<br/>"
                                   "of the '|' will be replaced with the<br/>"
                                   "string to the right.<br/>"
                                   "There have been %d patches issued.<br/>"
                                   "</body></html>")
                              (dec (count @content))))
        :patch-content-types ["text/plain"]
        :patch! (fn [ctx]
                 (dosync 
                  (let [body (slurp (get-in ctx [:request :body]))
                        parts (clojure.string/split body #"\|")
                        replaced (clojure.string/replace
                                     (last @content)
                                     (re-pattern (first parts))
                                     (last parts))
                        id   (count (alter content conj replaced))]
                    {::id id})))))
$ curl --header 'Content-Type: text/plain' --request PATCH --data 'all|ALL' http://localhost:3000/patchbox

Values specified by :patch-content-types will be returned as part of the Accept-Patch header in an OPTIONS request response for the resource.

In practice, one is more likely to implement the patch method using a more formalized method of describing changes between documents. If one is managing data in an XML format, perhaps XSLT can be used to describe the set of changes.

A more web friendly approach can be taken if the data is represented as JSON. A simple library to handle JSON diff and patch can be found at https://github.com/daviddpark/clj-json-patch, which was put together to meet a need of handling patch requests with liberator.

Continue with Putting it all together.