Honest question. Do people actually use PATCH and for what?

rglullis · on Oct 28, 2013

In a standard CRUD application, PATCH should be used for "U"pdates. So you should be able to change attributes of a resource without having to send all parameters to it. It gets a little confusing when you think that most people use POST to create resources, and PUT to do updates (partial or not) and leave PATCH without too much practical use.

So, if you want HTTP purity, think of PATCH as "the verb to use for partial updates without having to send all parameters in the form".

veesahni · on Oct 28, 2013

We use for almost all representation mutations. When representations have automatically updating fields (for example: timestamps), it makes a lot of sense to use PATCH.