[Cosmo-dev] CMP 204 responses

[Travis Vachon]

Hi folks

We've run into a problem on the webui side of things with CMP.

In short: Safari and Internet Explorer 6/7 can't deal with 204  
responses. Even if the 204 response has a body (which is against spec  
for a 204), neither Safari nor IE handle it correctly. To be a bit  
more specific, Safari treats it as an error with an undefined status  
code, and both IEs think it has a status code of "1223".

If this were the only problem with 204s I would be very hesitant to  
suggest that we change the protocol because of bad browser behavior.  
However, Brian suggested on IRC that returning 200s with updated  
representations of the resources we are working on would actually be  
more RESTful behavior (correct me if I paraphrased incorrectly..).

As such, I would like to propose the we replace all 204 responses  
with 200s. This would probably be in the 0.7 timeframe. The following  
calls would need to change:

Modify User (PUT /cmp/user/<username>)
Delete Account (DELETE /cmp/user/<username>)
Delete Multiple Accounts (POST /cmp/user/delete)
Activate Account (POST /cmp/activate/<username>)
Modify Account (PUT /cmp/account)

In the case of the two "modify" actions, we would return the updated  
user representation.

For the other three, I imagine we would return 200s with empty  
bodies. I'm by no means set in that opinion however, so other  
suggestions would be welcome.

This would probably impact all cmp clients (though I believe our  
webui code actually wouldn't need any modifications), and would  
probably be difficult to support backwards-compatibility-wise unless  
we changed the url scheme when we changed the responses.

Comments, questions, concerns?

-Travis