What do you mean by idempotent operation in Salesforce REST API?

Hi Chanchal,

Idempotence is an important design consideration when building reliable distributed systems. This post introduces you to idempotence, explains idempotence in the context of Salesforce system integrations, and gives you links to some additional resources that you can review for more information about idempotence.

From a RESTful service standpoint, for an operation (or service call) to be idempotent, clients can make that same call repeatedly while producing the same result. In other words, making multiple identical requests has the same effect as making a single request. Note that while idempotent operations produce the same result on the server (no side effects), the response itself may not be the same (e.g. a resource’s state may change between requests).

The PUT and DELETE methods are defined to be idempotent. However, there is a caveat on DELETE. The problem with DELETE, which if successful would normally return a 200 (OK) or 204 (No Content), will often return a 404 (Not Found) on subsequent calls, unless the service is configured to “mark” resources for deletion without actually deleting them. However, when the service actually deletes the resource, the next call will not find the resource to delete it and return a 404. However, the state on the server is the same after each DELETE call, but the response is different.

Thanks.

Hello,

Idempotence is a property that creates identical side effects whether you have one or many results. PUT has this characteristic, while POST creates new resources infinitely. In general, POST works best for resource creation, while PUT handles updates.

Thanks.