The IESG has received a request from the Constrained RESTful Environments WG (core) to consider the following document: - 'Patch and Fetch Methods for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)' <draft-ietf-core-etch-02.txt> as Proposed Standard The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2016-09-07. Exceptionally, comments may be sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting. Abstract The existing Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) methods only allow access to a complete resource, not to parts of a resource. In case of resources with larger or complex data, or in situations where a resource continuity is required, replacing or requesting the whole resource is undesirable. Several applications using CoAP will need to perform partial resource accesses. Similar to HTTP, the existing Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) GET method only allows the specification of a URI and request parameters in CoAP options, not the transfer of a request payload detailing the request. This leads to some applications to using POST where actually a cacheable, idempotent, safe request is desired. Again similar to HTTP, the existing Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) PUT method only allows to replace a complete resource. This also leads applications to use POST where actually a cacheable, possibly idempotent request is desired. This specification adds new CoAP methods, FETCH, to perform the equivalent of a GET with a request body; and the twin methods PATCH and iPATCH, to modify parts of a CoAP resource. The file can be obtained via https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-core-etch/ IESG discussion can be tracked via https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-core-etch/ballot/ No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D. The document has a reference to obsolete RFC 2616, this is intentional.
