Create/update relationships having attributes? about json-api

[lode]

First on the formal part.

Rereading the spec, I don't see a ban on having relationships.*.data.attributes for POST/PATCH requests, so I'm going to proceed with using them until I hear a good reason not to.

On creating resources it states:

If a relationship is provided in the relationships member of the resource object, its value MUST be a relationship object with a data member. The value of this key represents the linkage the new resource is to have.

Where linkage is zero or more resource identifier objects which only allow type, id, lid and meta.

On updating resources this isn't mentioned as explicit. But on updating relationships it is mentioned again that resource identifier objects should be used.

---

Further I feel your pain. It would be really handy if creating resource and its relationship could be done in one go.

I now often include an attribute on the primary resource which then would be passed on to the resource of the relationship:

{
	"data": {
		"type": "posts",
		"attributes": { 
			"title": "Some title",
			"tagNames": [
				"foo", "bar"
			]
		}
	}
}

I think the current alternative, next to the atomic extension, is to have multiple calls. I don't think that approach is very weird, but I also notice I often find myself being lazy to create that other endpoint which I wouldn't need otherwise.

[jelhan]

If the Atomic Operations extension feels overly complex and your use care requires creation of resources only (not updating or deleting resources), the Bulk Create extension might be a good fit. It allows creation of multiple resources in a single, atomic request using a JSON:API document similar to compound documents.

[FranzDeschler]

Version 1.1 of the specification now allows adding specification semantics via extensions.
So from my understanding, you can define your own extension which extends the "data" object accordingly by the required fields.