Posting to a nested collection resource does not work as expected [DATAREST-608]

Chris Beams opened DATAREST-608 and commented

Given entities Person and Posession, where Person has a collection of Possessions and both entities are exposed via SD REST repositories respectively, I would expect to be able to do something like the following:

POST /person/1/posessions
{ "name": "car" }

However, such a POST returns 405 or 204 depending on the context in which I call it (haven't debugged this fully).

It does of course work to post the new possession directly against its root collection resource:

POST /posessions
{ "name": "car", "person": "/person/1" }

I don't see anything in the documentation stating that mutative operations on nested collection resources are (or are not) supported. Am I missing something?

Note that it does seem like this use case is intended to be supported, based on tracing my way through RepositoryPropertyReferenceController#createPropertyReference (which does get called in the cases where the request does not immediately return 405). What I don't understand here is why this method calls #doWithReferencedProperty but then always returns 204 even for POSTs.

Affects: 2.4 M1 (Gosling)

3 votes, 4 watchers