PUT/PATCH don't support mongoose update operations

This should work:

curl -XPUT /api/v1/User -d {"$addToSet": {"friends": "BoB"}}

but because we use document.set instead of document.update we loose the ability to use any of the mongodb update operators

currently the way that request is handled it results in doing the following operation: doc.save({'$addToSet.friends': 'BoB'})

instead of the desired: doc.update({'$addToSet': {'friends': 'BoB}})

What do you think of this proposed solution? not tested yet, but seems to work on my use-cases

[b-gran]

That’s a good point about deep endpoints.

For me, the key feature in opening up all of the MongoDB update operators is actually field deletion, because it’s not currently possible to remove a field from a document.

To perform PUT/PATCH ops, we’re using

context.findOneAndUpdate(
  {},
  { $set: body },
  { ... }
)

If we update PUT to completely replace the document, we would at least get field deletion via PUT, but we still won’t have deletion via PATCH (which will still need to use $set)

[norpan]

If you decide to change this, please give consideration to the different semantics of PUT and PATCH. PUT is meant to replace a whole document. PATCH on the other hand is meant for just this use case.

There is a very good reason to separate PUT from PATCH. PUT is idempotent, which means that a client can assume that applying a PUT operation twice will give the same result as applying it once. So, while $addToSet happens to be idempotent, operations like $push are not.