alt Hacker NewsWouldn’t just putting an etag on POST requests accomplish the same thing? If I’m understanding it the server has to maintain state to ensure idempotency.
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Joker_vD • today at 12:25 PM
Unlike POST, however, the method is explicitly safe and idempotent, allowing
functions like caching and automatic retries to operate.
QUERY is GET with a request body. So it must be safe, not just idempotent. Where safe means it has no significant side-effects. Typically servers will not keep any state for QUERY requests.
There is one interesting variant though, which uses state: The client sends a QUERY containing the full query, and the server returns a url usable with GET with which this query can be triggered in the future. Similar to prepared statements in SQL databases.
Using QUERY for GraphQL queries (not mutations) would be a good match. These only read data, but are sometimes bigger than the url length limit.