changing meteor restivus PUT to implement upsert - api

Question

i'm using restivus with meteor and would like to change the PUT schemantic to an upsert.
// config rest endpoints
Restivus.configure({
useAuth: false,
prettyJson: false
});
Restivus.addCollection("sensor", {
excludedEndpoints: ['getAll','deleteAll','delete'],
defaultOptions: {},
});
how does one do this?

Answer 1

Right now, the only way to do this would be to provide a custom PUT endpoint on each collection route:
Restivus.addCollection(Sensors, {
excludedEndpoints: ['getAll','deleteAll','delete'],
endpoints: {
put: function () {
var entityIsUpdated = Sensors.upsert(this.urlParams.id, this.bodyParams);
if (entityIsUpdated) {
var entity = Sensors.findOne(this.urlParams.id);
return {status: "success", data: entity};
}
else {
return {
statusCode: 404,
body: {status: "fail", message: "Sensor not found"}
}
}
}
}
});
The goal with Restivus is to provide the best REST practices by default, and enough flexibility to allow the user to override it with custom behavior where they desire. The proper RESTful behavior of PUT is to completely replace the entity with a given ID. It should never generate a new entity (that's what POST is for). For collections, Restivus will only allow you to define a PUT on a specific entity. In your example, an endpoint is generated for PUT /api/sensors/:id. If you aren't doing the PUT by :id, then you should probably be using POST instead (there's no "right way" to do this in REST, but at least you can POST without requiring an :id).
It sounds like what you want is a way to override the default behavior of the collections endpoints. That is extremely doable, but it would help me if you would make a feature request via the Restivus GitHub Issues so I can better track it. You can literally copy and paste your question from here. I'll make sure I add a way for you to access the collection in the context of any collection endpoints you define.
Last, but certainly not least, I noticed you are using v0.6.0, which needs to be updated to 0.6.1 immediately to fix an existing bug which prevents you from adding existing collections or using any collections created in Restivus anywhere else. That wasn't the intended behavior, and an update has been released. Check out the docs for more on that.