Should HTTP POST be discouraged?

Posted by Tomas Sedovic on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tomas Sedovic
Published on 2010-05-18T09:22:43Z Indexed on 2010/05/18 9:30 UTC
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http

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post

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best-practices

Quoting from the CouchDB documentation:

It is recommended that you avoid POST when possible, because proxies and other network intermediaries will occasionally resend POST requests, which can result in duplicate document creation.

To my understanding, this should not be happening on the protocol level (a confused user armed with a doubleclick is a completely different story). What is the best course of action, then?

Should we really try to avoid POST requests and replace them by PUT? I don't like that as they convey a different meaning.

Should we anticipate this and protect the requests by unique IDs where we want to avoid accidental duplication? I don't like that either: it complicates the code and prevents situations where multiple identical posts may be desired.

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