In REST APIs, it is customary to make a PATCH
or PUT
request to a resource's URI (for example, /v1/publishers/{publisher}/books/{book}
) in order to update that resource.
Resource-oriented design (AIP-121) honors this pattern through the Update
method (which mirrors the REST PATCH
behavior). These RPCs accept the URI representing that resource and return the resource.
APIs should generally provide an update method for resources unless it is not valuable for users to do so. The purpose of the update method is to make changes to the resources without causing side effects.
Update methods are specified using the following pattern:
rpc UpdateBook(UpdateBookRequest) returns (Book) {
option (google.api.http) = {
patch: "/v1/{book.name=publishers/*/books/*}"
body: "book"
};
option (google.api.method_signature) = "book,update_mask";
}
Update
. The remainder of the RPC name should be the singular form of the resource's message name.Request
suffix.UpdateBookResponse
.)
google.longrunning.Operation
which resolves to the resource itself.PATCH
.
PUT
. However, this is strongly discouraged because it becomes a backwards-incompatible change to add fields to the resource.name
field should map to the URI path.
{resource}.name
field should be the only variable in the URI path.body
key in the google.api.http
annotation, and it must map to the resource field in the request message.
google.api.method_signature
annotation, with a value of "{resource},update_mask"
.Note: Unlike the other four standard methods, the URI path here references a nested field (book.name
) in the example. If the resource field has a word separator, snake_case
is used.
Update methods implement a common request message pattern:
message UpdateBookRequest {
// The book to update.
//
// The book's `name` field is used to identify the book to update.
// Format: publishers/{publisher}/books/{book}
Book book = 1 [(google.api.field_behavior) = REQUIRED];
// The list of fields to update.
google.protobuf.FieldMask update_mask = 2;
}
PATCH
body.name
field must be included in the resource message. It should be called name
.google.protobuf.FieldMask
, and it must be called update_mask
.
*
, meaning full replacement (the equivalent of PUT
).
*
without knowledge of said new, mutable fields. Likewise consumers need to use *
only when the risks of doing so are acceptable. In general, it is safest to explicitly specify the fields to update rather than use *
.In general, update methods are intended to update the data within the resource. Update methods should not trigger other side effects. Instead, side effects should be triggered by custom methods.
In particular, this entails that state fields must not be directly writable in update methods.
PATCH and PUTTL;DR: Google APIs generally use the PATCH
HTTP verb only, and do not support PUT
requests.
We standardize on PATCH
because Google updates stable APIs in place with backwards-compatible improvements. It is often necessary to add a new field to an existing resource, but this becomes a breaking change when using PUT
.
To illustrate this, consider a PUT
request to a Book
resource:
PUT /v1/publishers/123/books/456
{"title": "Mary Poppins", "author": "P.L. Travers"}
Next consider that the resource is later augmented with a new field (here we add rating
):
message Book {
string title = 1;
string author = 2;
// Subsequently added to v1 in place...
int32 rating = 3;
}
If a rating is set on a book and the existing PUT
request was executed, it would wipe out the book's rating. In essence, a PUT
request unintentionally wiped out data because the previous version did not know about it.
Some resources take longer to update a resource than is reasonable for a regular API request. In this situation, the API should use a long-running operation (AIP-151) instead:
rpc UpdateBook(UpdateBookRequest) returns (google.longrunning.Operation) {
option (google.api.http) = {
patch: "/v1/{book.name=publishers/*/books/*}"
body: "book"
};
option (google.longrunning.operation_info) = {
response_type: "Book"
metadata_type: "OperationMetadata"
};
}
response_type
and metadata_type
fields must be specified.Note: Declarative-friendly resources (AIP-128) should use long-running update.
Create or updateIf the service uses client-assigned resource names, Update
methods may expose a bool allow_missing
field, which will cause the method to succeed in the event that the user attempts to update a resource that is not present (and will create the resource in the process):
message UpdateBookRequest {
// The book to update.
//
// The book's `name` field is used to identify the book to be updated.
// Format: publishers/{publisher}/books/{book}
Book book = 1 [(google.api.field_behavior) = REQUIRED];
// The list of fields to be updated.
google.protobuf.FieldMask update_mask = 2;
// If set to true, and the book is not found, a new book will be created.
// In this situation, `update_mask` is ignored.
bool allow_missing = 3;
}
More specifically, the allow_missing
flag triggers the following behavior:
INVALID_ARGUMENT
error is returned.The user must have the update permissions to call Update
even with allow_missing
set to true
. For customers that want to prevent users from creating resources using the update method, IAM conditions should be used.
An API may sometimes need to allow users to send update requests which are guaranteed to be made against the most current data (a common use case for this is to detect and avoid race conditions). Resources which need to enable this do so by including a string etag
field, which contains an opaque, server-computed value representing the content of the resource.
In this situation, the resource should contain a string etag
field:
message Book {
option (google.api.resource) = {
type: "library.googleapis.com/Book"
pattern: "publishers/{publisher}/books/{book}"
};
// The resource name of the book.
// Format: publishers/{publisher}/books/{book}
string name = 1 [(google.api.field_behavior) = IDENTIFIER];
// The title of the book.
// Example: "Mary Poppins"
string title = 2;
// The author of the book.
// Example: "P.L. Travers"
string author = 3;
// The etag for this book.
// If this is provided on update, it must match the server's etag.
string etag = 4;
}
The etag
field may be either required or optional. If it is set, then the request must succeed if and only if the provided etag matches the server-computed value, and must fail with an ABORTED
error otherwise. The update_mask
field in the request does not affect the behavior of the etag
field, as it is not a field being updated.
APIs sometimes encounter situations where some fields on a resource are expensive or impossible to reliably return.
This can happen in a few situations:
In this situation, an API may return back only the fields that were updated, and omit the rest, and should document this behavior if they do so.
ErrorsSee errors, in particular when to use PERMISSION_DENIED and NOT_FOUND errors.
In addition, if the user does have proper permission, but the requested resource does not exist, the service must error with NOT_FOUND
(HTTP 404) unless allow_missing
is set to true
.
update_mask
.update_mask
optional field_behaviour guidance a must.update_mask
name guidance a must.allow_missing
is set.FAILED_PRECONDITION
(which becomes HTTP 400) to ABORTED
(409).allow_missing
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