At 04:11 PM 2/20/2004, Mark Stahl wrote:
On Feb 20, 2004
I'm a little new to this dicussions, so please excuse me if I'm
rehashing an old topic.
I tend to agree that there is good programming value in an explict
"create" operation. I presume the alternative proposal is implicit
create triggered by a modify operation. There was a proposal that
under the implicit create model, an explict create could be simulated
by first doing a 'get' followed by a 'modify', but this was felt to
be inefficient (and not a very clean transaction model.) So I think
explicit create is necessary.
Assuming we add create, what then is the semantic of modify? I'm
guessing it no longer does implicit create, so if the data to modify
does not exist, the modify operation will fail.
no -- we don't have 'modify'. We have 'merge' and 'replace'.
In this case, merge and replace work exactly as before.
(Merge X with nothing or replace nothing with X -- both work).
But this creates a similar inefficiency in the case where the user
wants to either modify or create some data, which is likely to be the
case much of the time? With only those two operations, the user must
first get to determine if the data exists, then either modify or
create, as appropriate.
So there appear to me to be three operations to be considered:
- modify-only
- create-or-modify
- create-only
Which are being considered as part of this spec? I'm inclined to
think all three should be possible.
create-or-modify is all we have in the spec today.