Change a Person

Once your client application has retrieved a person, it can modify it and submit the changed version. If you are following this example using curl from the command line, you can simply copy the returned entry into a text editor and manually change one of the values. For example:

<vdf:field name="com.escenic.city">Oslo</vdf:field>

and save the results to a file (called my-edited-person.xml, for example).

To commit your change you have to submit a PUT request to the same URI that you would use to retrieve it (that is, the URI supplied in the search results entry edit or self link).

curl --include -u user:password -X PUT -H "If-Match: *" -H "Content-Type: application/atom+xml" \
> http://host-ip-address/webservice/escenic/person/20 --upload-file my-edited-person.xml
HTTP/1.1 100 Continue

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:50:26 GMT

In order for the PUT operation to work, you must specify two HTTP headers as shown above:

Content-Type: application/atom+xml

You must specify the content type of the data you are uploading.

If-Match: *

The If-Match header value * is used here for reasons of simplicity. It is acceptable to use it for test and demonstration purposes, but should never be used in a production system. For more information about this header and what it does, see Optimistic Concurrency.

If you're using curl, it's a good idea to specify --include with PUT operations: curl will then output the response header returned from the web service as shown above, and you can verify whether or not the operation was successful:

• A response code in the 2xx range indicates success.

• A response code in the 4xx range means that you made an invalid edit and the server won’t accept your modification.

• A response code in the 5xx range means there is a server error.