Incrementing resource counter in a RESTful way: PUT vs POST

Question

I have a resource that has a counter. For the sake of example, let\'s call the resource profile, and the counter is the number of views

Answer 1

I think both approaches of Yanic and Rich are interresting. A PATCH does not need to be safe or indempotent but can be in order to be more robust against concurrency. Rich's solution is certainly easier to use in a "standard" REST API.

See RFC5789:

PATCH is neither safe nor idempotent as defined by [RFC2616], Section 9.1.

A PATCH request can be issued in such a way as to be idempotent, which also helps prevent bad outcomes from collisions between two PATCH requests on the same resource in a similar time frame. Collisions from multiple PATCH requests may be more dangerous than PUT collisions because some patch formats need to operate from a known base-point or else they will corrupt the resource.