Bulk (or batch) operations are used to perform an action on more than one resource in single request. This can help reduce networking overhead. For network performance it is usually better to make fewer requests instead of more requests with less data.<\/p>\n
However, before adding support for bulk operations you should think twice if this feature is really needed. Often network performance is not what limits request throughput. You should also consider techniques like HTTP pipelining<\/a> as alternative to improve performance.<\/p>\n When implementing bulk operations we should differentiate between two different cases:<\/p>\n In the next section we will explore different solutions that can help us with both situations. Be aware that the shown solutions might not look very REST-like. Bulk operations in general are not very compatible with REST constraints as we operate on different resources with a single request. So there simply is no real REST solution.<\/p>\n In the following examples we will always return a synchronous response. However, as bulk operations usually take longer to process it is likely you are also interested in an asynchronous processing style. In this case, my post about asynchronous operations with REST<\/a> might also be interesting to you.<\/p>\n Probably a way that comes to mind quickly is to use a standard data format like JSON to define a list of desired operations.<\/p>\n Let’s start with a simple example request:<\/p>\n\n
Expressing multiple operations within the request body<\/h2>\n