The problem with the above design is that I want to support a bunch of different actions that can be taken against a table:

insert a single row
insert multiple rows
bulk update rows
rename table
alter table
drop table

I could have ALL of those be a POST /db/table with different JSON root keys ({"drop": true} for example, but this raises two problems:

Server logs that only show POST /db/table will be less useful, they won't reveal what action was performed
What happens if you send {"insert": {"title": "New record"}, "drop": true}? Does that return an error, or does it perform both of those actions?

This is already slightly confusing in that POST /db/name-of-query is the existing API for executing a writable canned query: https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/sql_queries.html#json-api-for-writable-canned-queries

So I'm ready to consider other design options.

Initial thoughts on possible designs (for the single row insert case, but could be expanded to cover other verbs):

POST /db/table?action=insert
POST /db/table?nsert
POST /db/table/-/insert

I quite like that third one: it feels consistent with the existing /-/actor etc pages that Datasette serves already.

There's one slight confusion here in that it overlaps with the URL for a row with a primary key of "-" - which is currently at /db/table/- - but that might be OK.

Especially if I say that child pages of rows must theselves use the /-/ pattern. So to update or delet a row you would use:

POST /db/table/row/-/update
POST /db/table/row/-/delete

So a row with primary key - would end up as /db/table/row/-/-/update - which I think is OK.

Uh oh!

Design URLs for the write API #1868

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