HTTP Range Header for Entity lists

Question

I have resources like this

/entities        # GET, POST
/entities/<id>   # GET, PUT, DELETE

GET /entities gets the list of all entities. Now I want to poll for updates. The case for a single entity is straight forward:

GET /entities/2
If-Modified-Since: <http date>

The list is tricky. I want the response to be a list of entities, updated or created since a given point in time. I'd intuitively use

GET /entities
Range: after <http date>

Which is a valid request by HTTP specification http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.35.2 . But the spec also mandates a 206 Partial Content response, which has to include a Content-Range header. A Content-Range header, in turn, mandates a byte range to be specified http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.16 . This is obviously very inconvenient for my use case.

How would you request a semantic range over HTTP?

are you sure Range can be used with a date? Section 14.35.1 only discusses byte ranges. — Jeff Ogata
– Jeff Ogata, Commented Oct 23, 2011 at 20:34
I agree with @adrift, I can find no reference anywhere in any RFC to Range: after <http date> being valid in HTTP/1.1 - if it were, the Content-Range: header would be defined to accomodate for it, otherwise the practice would only be half defined. — DaveRandom
– DaveRandom, Commented Oct 23, 2011 at 21:47
The Httpbis spec seems to have a bit more details about non-byte ranges tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p5-range-16 — Darrel Miller
– Darrel Miller, Commented Oct 23, 2011 at 23:43

Jeff Ogata · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-23 23:34:56Z

2

From reading section 14.35.1, I would say that the Range header is used to request a specific range of bytes from a resource, not to request a group of entities according to when they were modified.

In this case, I believe you should treat your range as a filter and pass the date as a query string parameter:

GET /entities?modified-since=<date>

answered Oct 23, 2011 at 23:34

Jeff Ogata

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1 Comment

Bendlas Over a year ago

That's what I concluded too. Non byte ranges seem to be allowed for sake of future compatibility, but very underspecified.

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