How best do you represent a bi-directional sync in a REST api?

Posted by Edward M Smith on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Edward M Smith
Published on 2012-02-16T16:16:20Z Indexed on 2012/03/20 5:39 UTC
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Assuming a system where there's a Web Application with a resource, and a reference to a remote application with another similar resource, how do you represent a bi-directional sync action which synchronizes the 'local' resource with the 'remote' resource?

Example:

I have an API that represents a todo list.

GET/POST/PUT/DELETE /todos/, etc.

That API can reference remote TODO services.

GET/POST/PUT/DELETE /todo_services/, etc.

I can manipulate todos from the remote service through my API as a proxy via

GET/POST/PUT/DELETE /todo_services/abc123/, etc.

I want the ability to do a bi-directional sync between a local set of todos and the remote set of TODOS.

In a rpc sort of way, one could do

POST /todo_services/abc123/sync/

But, in the "verbs are bad" idea, is there a better way to represent this action?

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