Individual Submission L. Dusseault Internet-Draft OSAF Expires: February 6, 2005 August 8, 2004 Partial Document Changes (PATCH Method) for HTTP draft-dusseault-http-patch-04 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is subject to all provisions of section 3 of RFC 3667. By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she become aware will be disclosed, in accordance with RFC 3668. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http:// www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on February 6, 2005. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved. Abstract Several applications extending HTTP [3] require a feature to do partial resource modification. Existing HTTP functionality only allows a complete replacement of a document. This proposal adds a new HTTP method, PATCH, to modify an existing HTTP resource. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 1. Introduction Three use cases initially motivated this proposal 1. WebDAV [2] is used by authoring applications to store and share files on the internet. For example, Adobe Photoshop has a Workgroup feature allowing the user to browse a repository and save the file. Currently, Photoshop only publishes the file to the repository rarely, because Photoshop files are typically large and upload is slow. Worse, large uploads are more likely to be interrupted. Although HTTP provides byte range downloads, it does not provide a mechanism for partial uploads. 2. DeltaV [6] extends WebDAV to do versioning. In versioning environments, a large number of files may be updated with very small changes. For example, a programmer may change the name of a function used in a hundred source files. Versioning applications typically send deltas or patches to the server to modify these files, however DetaV does not yet have this functionality. 3. The SIMPLE WG is devising a way to store and modify configuration information. The biggest feature missing from HTTP is the ability to modify information in a very lightweight manner, so that the client that decides to change its presence state from "free" to "busy" doesn't have to upload a large document. This can be accomplished through changes to a HTTP resource as well. Other working groups (like netconf) are also considering manipulating large files using HTTP GET and PUT. Sometimes the files aren't that large but the device is small or bandwidth is limited, as when phones need to add a new contact to an address book file. This feature would allow much more efficient changes to files. This specification defines a new HTTP 1.1 method for patches. A new method is necessary to improve interoperability and prevent errors. The PUT method is already defined to overwrite a resource with a complete new body, and MUST NOT be reused to do partial changes. Otherwise, proxies and caches and even clients and servers may get confused as to the result of the operation. Note that byte ranges are already used in HTTP to do partial downloads (GET method). However, they are not defined for uploads, and there are some missing pieces for uploads. For example, the HTTP specification does not define a particularly informative error to send if the byte range in a PUT is invalid. Byte ranges (or some other kind of range) could be made to work in this specification but a more flexible mechanism (one that could also encompass XML patch formats) was desired, as well as a method that would not confuse caching proxies. Reliable and tested patch algorithms already exist, Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 and this specification takes advantage of that existing work. Other patch formats ("delta encodings") are defined for HTTP in RFC 3229 [4]. That specification defines delta encodings for cache updates, not for user write operations. It does mean that servers can reuse delta encoding algorithms to support both that specification and this proposal. This specification defines the new method PATCH to alter a single existing resource, in place, by applying a patch. The operation is atomic. Note that WebDAV MOVE and COPY requests, if supported by the HTTP server, can be useful to independently rename or copy a whole resource before applying PATCH to either the source or destination URL to modify the contents. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 2. Patch Formats A set of changes for a resource is itself a document, called a patch document. The patch format is uniquely identified through a MIME type. Servers advertise supported patch formats by advertising these MIME types, and clients specify which one they're using by including the MIME type in the request. MIME types were specifically chosen so that there would be a well-defined way for other PATCH extensions to define their own patch formats and how to use them. This specification only defines usage of the platform-portable gdiff [9] format identified as 'application/gdiff'. Servers SHOULD support gdiff for all authorable resources, that is all resources that support PUT. Some requirements apply only to specific patch formats, and in this specification those requirements are spelled out only for gdiff. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 3. Mechanisms 3.1 PATCH Method The PATCH method requests that the request body (a patch document) be applied to the resource identified by the Request-URI. The server MUST NOT create a new resource with the contents of the request body, although it MAY (depending on the patch document format) apply the request body to an empty entity to result in the content for the new resource. The target resource's content type MUST be one to which the patch format applies. The server MUST apply the entire patch atomically and never provide (e.g. in response to a GET during this operation) a partially-patched body. If the entire patch file cannot be successfully applied then the server MUST fail the entire request, applying none of the changes. See error handling section for details on status codes and possible error conditions. In the model defined in RFC3230 [5], the patch document is modelled as an instance being sent to the server. Thus, if the server supports instance manipulations, the client MAY apply these manipulations to the patch document after it is generated (for example, a compression algorithm). On the receiving end, the server MUST undo the instance manipulation then apply the resulting document as a patch. PATCH request bodies MUST NOT be cached. A cache MAY mark the resource identified in the Request-URI as stale if it sees a successful response to the PATCH request. The PATCH request MUST have a body. It MUST include the Content-Type header with a MIME [1] type value identifying the patch format used in the request body. The request body MUST be in some format which has the semantics of defining a change to an existing document. The PATCH request is subject to access control, which in turn may require authentication. If the server supports WebDAV Access Control [8], then the PATCH request SHOULD be subject to the same access control permissions as the PUT request. If the gdiff format is used: o The client MUST verify that it is applying the patch document to a known entity. There are two reliable ways to do this. The first way is to find out the resource ETag at the time the body is downloaded, and use that Etag in the If-Match header on the PATCH request to make sure the resource is still unchanged. The second way to use WebDAV LOCK/UNLOCK to reserve the file (first LOCK, then GET, then PATCH, then UNLOCK). Gdiff collisions from Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 multiple users are more dangerous than PUT collisions, because a gdiff that is not operating from a known base point may corrupt the resource. Therefore, if neither strong ETags nor LOCKS are available from the server, the client MUST use If-Unmodified-Since as a less-reliable safeguard. o If the Request-URI does not identify an existing resource, the server SHOULD (subject of course to access control and other restrictions) create a resource with an empty body and apply the gdiff changes to that empty entity. A client SHOULD verify that the URL is unmapped, as expected, with use of the "If-None-Match: *" header. Simple PATCH example PATCH /file.txt HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Content-type: application/gdiff If-Match: "e0023aa4e" Content-Length: 100 [gdiff-binary-body] Figure 1 This example illustrates use of the gdiff algorithm on an existing text file. 3.2 PATCH Response 3.2.1 Success Response A successful response with the 204 No Content status code implies that no new resource was created. A successful response with the 201 Created status code informs the client that a new resource was created. The server SHOULD provide a MD5 hash of the resource entity after the patch was applied. This allows the client to verify the success of the operation. As with PUT, the PATCH method MUST cause the ETag to change if the resulting entity is not identical to the original. If the server supports strong ETags, the server MUST return a strong ETag for use in future client operations. The server SHOULD return the Last-Modified header in any case, but the server MUST return the Last-Modified header if ETags aren't supported. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 Successful PATCH response to existing text file HTTP/1.1 204 No Content Content-MD5: Q2hlY2sgSW50ZWdyaXR5IQ== ETag: "e0023aa4e" 3.2.2 Error handling This proposal uses the same mechanism as DeltaV (defined in section 1.6 of RFC3253) to add much-needed info to base HTTP error responses. Existing HTTP status codes are not infinitely extensible but XML elements and namespaces are more so, and it's simple to treat the HTTP error code as a rough category and put detailed error codes in the body. Clients that do not use the extra information ignore the bodies of error responses. The PATCH method can return the following errors. Please note that the notation "DAV:foobar" is merely short form for expressing "the 'foobar' element in the 'DAV:' namespace". It has meaning only in this specification, not on the wire. Also note that the string error codes are not meant to be displayed but instead as machine parsable known error codes (thus there is no language code). DAV:delta-format-unsupported: Used with 403 Forbidden status code. Returned by the server when it doesn't support the patch format chosen by the client. DAV:delta-format-forbidden-on-resource: Used with 403 Forbidden when the patch format chosen by the client is supported by the server but not allowed on this kind of resource. DAV:delta-format-badly-formatted: Used with 400 Bad Request when the server finds that the patch document provided by the client was badly formatted or non-compliant. The definition of badly formatted or non-compliant depends on the patch format chosen, but generally if the server finds it can't handle the current patch even though it supports the format used, this error ought to be appropriate. DAV:patch-empty-resource: Used with 409 Conflict when the resource addressed in the Request-URI exists but is empty, and the patch format cannot be applied to an empty document. Note that some patch formats may be applied to an empty document, in which case this error wouldn't be used. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 DAV:patch-result-invalid: Used with 409 Conflict when the resource could be patched but the result of the patch would be a resource which is invalid. This could mean, for example, that a XML resource would become an invalid XML file if the patch specified that a close element text line should be deleted. "404 Not Found" can be used (with no body/error element) when the URL in by the Request-URI does not map to a resource and the server cannot apply the patch document to a new empty resource (thus this error wouldn't be used with gdiff patch documents). 3.3 Advertising Support in OPTIONS The server advertises its support for the features described here with OPTIONS response headers. The "Allow" OPTIONS header is already defined in HTTP 1.1 to contain all the allowed methods on the addressed resource, so the server MUST add PATCH if it is allowed. Clients also need to know whether the server supports special patch formats, so this document introduces a new OPTIONS response header "Accept-Patch". "Accept-Patch" MUST appear in the OPTIONS response for any resource where the PATCH method is shown as an allowed method. OPTIONS * is not used to advertise support for PATCH because the patch formats supported are likely to change from one resource to another. A server MAY include the Accept-Patch header in response to OPTIONS *, and its value MAY be the union of known supported patch formats. Accept-Patch = "Accept-Patch" ":" #media-type Example: OPTIONS request and response for specific resource [request] OPTIONS /example/buddies.xml HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com [response] HTTP/1.1 200 OK Allow: GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS, HEAD, TRACE, DELETE, PATCH Accept-Patch: example/xcap+xml, application/gdiff Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 The examples show a server that supports PATCH generally, with two formats supported (one of them is fictional). On some resources, for example on XML files, different kinds of patch formats more appropriate to the resource may be supported. 4 References [1] Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046, November 1996. [2] Goland, Y., Whitehead, E., Faizi, A., Carter, S. and D. Jensen, "HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring -- WEBDAV", RFC 2518, February 1999. [3] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P. and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. [4] Mogul, J., Krishnamurthy, B., Douglis, F., Feldmann, A., Goland, Y., van Hoff, A. and D. Hellerstein, "Delta encoding in HTTP", RFC 3229, January 2002. [5] Mogul, J. and A. Van Hoff, "Instance Digests in HTTP", RFC 3230, January 2002. [6] Clemm, G., Amsden, J., Ellison, T., Kaler, C. and J. Whitehead, "Versioning Extensions to WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)", RFC 3253, March 2002. [7] Korn, D., MacDonald, J., Mogul, J. and K. Vo, "The VCDIFF Generic Differencing and Compression Data Format", RFC 3284, June 2002. [8] Clemm, G., Reschke, J., Sedlar, E. and J. Whitehead, "Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Access Control Protocol", RFC 3744, May 2004. [9] van Hoff, A. and J. Payne, "Generic Diff Format Specification", W3C NOTE-gdiff-19970901, August 1997. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 Author's Address Lisa Dusseault Open Source Application Foundation 2064 Edgewood Dr. Palo Alto, CA 94303 US EMail: lisa@osafoundation.org Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 Appendix A. Acknowledgements PATCH is not a new concept, it first appeared in HTTP in drafts of version 1.1 written by Roy Fielding and Henrik Frystyk. Thanks to Adam Roach, Chris Sharp, Julian Reschke, Geoff Clemm, Scott Lawrence, Jeffrey Mogul, Roy Fielding, Greg Stein, Jim Luther, Alex Rousskov and Jamie Lokier for review and advice on this document. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 Appendix B. Changes B.1 Changes from -00 OPTIONS support: removed "Patch" header definition and used Allow and new "Accept-Patch" headers instead. Supported patch formats: removed vcdiff and diffe as these do not have defined MIME types and did not seem to be strongly desired. PATCH method definition: Clarified cache behavior. B.2 Changes from -01 Removed references to XCAP - not yet a RFC. Fixed use of MIME types (this "fix" now obsolete) Explained how to use MOVE or COPY in conjunction with PATCH, to create a new resource based on an existing resource in a different location. B.3 Changes from -02 Clarified that MOVE and COPY are really independent of PATCH. Clarified when an ETag must change, and when Last-Modified must be used. Clarified what server should do if both Content-Type and IM headers appear in PATCH request. Filled in missing reference to DeltaV and ACL RFCs. Stopped using 501 Unsupported for unsupported patch formats. Clarified what a static resource is. Refixed use of MIME types for patch formats. Limited the scope of some restrictions to apply only to 'gdiff' usage. B.4 Changes from -03 Various typographical, terminology consistency, and other minor clarifications or fixes. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 12]
Internet-Draft HTTP PATCH August 2004 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at http://www.ietf.org/ipr. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement this standard. Please address the information to the IETF at ietf-ipr@ietf.org. Disclaimer of Validity This document and the information contained herein are provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. Acknowledgment Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Dusseault Expires February 6, 2005 [Page 13]