restcookbook.com

I want to figure out which methods are supported on a resource.

use the OPTIONS method for this:

OPTIONS /my/resource HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Allow: HEAD,GET,DELETE,OPTIONS

Even though it's not defined, this method CAN return a message body. It will return an ALLOW header, that returns all the methods the current resource is capable of handling.

If resources require authentication, it is possible that OPTIONS returns more methods once you added authentication headers to the request.

OPTIONS /a/resource HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Allow: HEAD,GET,OPTIONS

OPTIONS /a/resource HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Authentication: .....
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Allow: HEAD,GET,PUT,POST,DELETE,OPTIONS

See also

• Zac Stewart's blogpost about OPTIONS

Caveats

• OPTIONS is not a very common implemented method.

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