Any API endpoint that updates part of a record has to decide what a missing field means, whether the client left it alone or wants it cleared. Most business APIs face that decision constantly, because records like customers, orders, and accounts are edited through forms and clients that rarely send everything. Few problems have left me as dizzy as this one, partly because it's hard, but mostly because of how many competing solutions keep getting promoted for it, from patch formats to field masks to change-tracking client libraries.
Most of those solutions ask every client to get something subtle right, when most teams need a write surface any client can call correctly on the first try. I think the simplest way there is PUT, where every body must include every field and the server has nothing left to guess. That only works once a resource is small enough for any client to send whole, so the real change is to stop letting the shape of your reads design your writes. When a group of fields has a single owner, when a change starts a workflow, or when a collection's items come and go individually, each gets its own path. That can look like a workaround, but I'd argue it's healthy normalization of the write surface.
Write Intentions Exceed Request Semantics
Each field in a write body carries one of four intents:
- Leave alone. The field isn't part of this change.
- Set a value. Including zero, empty, or false.
- Clear. Remove the current value.
- Change one element of a collection. Add or remove an item without resending the rest.
The examples use one customer, which the API reads whole:
GET /customers/42
{
"displayName": "Ada",
"phoneNumber": "555-1234",
"email": "*Emails are not allowed*",
"verified": true,
"isActive": true,
"tags": ["vip", "beta"]
}
By convention, updates to /customers/42 accept that same shape, whether they arrive as PATCH, PUT, or POST. JSON can express the first three intents for phoneNumber by sending a value, sending null, or leaving it out. But most servers read the body into a fixed model where missing and null become the same empty value, so the endpoint has to pick a rule, and the rule decides which two intents survive:
| Body | Replace the resource | Skip nulls |
|---|
"phoneNumber": "555-1234" | Set | Set |
"phoneNumber": null | Clear | Leave alone |
phoneNumber omitted | Clear | Leave alone |
Skipping nulls gives up clear, so a phone number, once set, can never be removed. Teams often work around that one field at a time, with an empty string that means clear or a separate clearPhoneNumber flag, and the next nullable field breaks the same way. Replacing gives up leave alone, which is safe only while every client sends every field. A view model that loads only the fields its screen shows breaks that silently, clearing everything else on save. A client built before a field existed does the same, which makes every new writable field a contract change. The fourth intent doesn't fit a single field at all, because tags can only be sent whole.
Clients Hold State, Not Changes
A handler can fix the server side by reading the raw document or accepting a patch format that encodes intent. But a partial update is only as correct as the client that built it, and the client has to know which fields the user touched.
The form often knows, since libraries like Angular's reactive forms and React Hook Form track dirty fields. But the form doesn't send the request. A view model maps its values onto a DTO, a service layer passes that along, and a generated SDK type turns an unset property into a default or a null. By the time the request leaves, "the user didn't touch this" has been flattened into a value, and preserving it means threading change tracking through every layer of every client, including partners'. Diffing the loaded document against the outgoing one doesn't help, because a field a mapper defaulted shows up as a change the user never made.
A client can skip change tracking by sending only the fields its form owns, so the contact form sends { displayName, phoneNumber } and the handler checks which keys are present in the raw JSON. That works while every client scopes its bodies the same way, but nothing on the server enforces the grouping. The endpoint still accepts isActive from any caller that includes it, the handler still decides field by field who may set what and what each change triggers, and a typed SDK that models the whole customer loses presence again on the way out. The form scope is the right boundary, held in the wrong place, by convention in each client instead of by the server.
The standards never settled partial updates. RFC 5789, which defined PATCH in 2010, left the body format open on the expectation that "no single format will be appropriate for all types of resources." Two kinds of answer grew into that gap. Patch formats are standardized request bodies that describe each change explicitly. API design guides are the rulebooks large companies publish for how their own APIs should behave, including how they accept updates. Teams tend to adopt either one as the professional answer.
JSON Patch, defined in RFC 6902, encodes all four intents explicitly, as add, remove, and replace operations addressed by path. A path into an array is an index, though, so removing beta means removing /tags/1, which deletes the wrong tag if someone reordered the array first, unless a test operation guards it. JSON Merge Patch, from RFC 7396, is simpler and covers three, but replaces arrays whole. Neither can tell a client which fields changed, so adopting one hands every caller the change-tracking problem.
Design guides carry a different risk, because they aren't neutral standards but one company's internal practice, published. The field masks in Google's API Improvement Proposals are built around protobuf messages and generated clients Google produces for its own APIs, and the client still has to fill each mask with the fields that changed. Microsoft publishes its REST API Guidelines hoping other organizations will "create guidelines that are appropriate for them."
Those choices fit organizations that own their clients, generate their SDKs, and employ governance teams to enforce conformance. Copied into a team without that, they become ritual, kept because a large company published them rather than because they solve anything the team has.
None of that makes partial updates a mistake, only a tool for documents rather than records. A preferences bag that gains keys every release suits JSON Merge Patch, and because nothing maps it onto a fixed model, a present, null, or absent key still carries all three intents. A large configuration document suits JSON Patch. The rest of this post is about records.
The Wide Write Is a Normalization Failure
The shared update body mirrors the read, so the write has to have an opinion about every field, including verified, which no client should set, and isActive, which most callers shouldn't touch.
A read is allowed to be a composition, and serving the whole customer in one GET is good design, but it's a view over things with different rules. The wide write happens when that view becomes the write target, usually because one model serves both directions, and it fails the way an unnormalized table does, by giving unrelated facts a single place to be written. That's a governance gap more than a technical one. Nobody decided what the write surface should be, so the read model decided for them.
PUT doesn't rescue it. RFC 9110 defines PUT as replacing "the state of the target resource" with "the state defined by the representation enclosed," which only works when every client can produce every field and is entitled to replace each one.
Normalize the Write Surface
A normalized write surface writes each field where its owner, permission, and workflow live, while reads compose those resources into views for each screen. It's the read and write split of CQRS, with both sides left as ordinary HTTP resources.
Three Tests Decide What Shares a Resource
Two fields belong in the same writable resource only when they pass all three tests:
- Same owner. The same party is entitled to decide both values.
- Same authorization scope. A caller needs the same permission to change either one.
- Same workflow. Changing either one triggers the same consequences, or none.
| Field | Owner | Authorization scope | Workflow | Write |
|---|
displayName | Customer | Edit own profile | None | PUT /customers/42/profile |
phoneNumber | Customer | Edit own profile | None | PUT /customers/42/profile |
email | Customer | Edit own profile | Verification email | PUT /customers/42/email |
verified | Server | Not client-writable | Set by verification | None |
isActive | Operations | Manage account status | Deactivation checks | POST /customers/42/deactivate |
tags | Support | Manage tags | None | POST and DELETE /customers/42/tags |
displayName and phoneNumber pass all three and share a resource. Every other field fails at least one test, so the one wide body becomes these requests:
PUT /customers/42/profile
{ "displayName": "Ada", "phoneNumber": null }
PUT /customers/42/email
{ "email": "*Emails are not allowed*" }
POST /customers/42/tags
{ "name": "vip" }
DELETE /customers/42/tags/beta
POST /customers/42/deactivate
The server requires every field in each body, so a body that leaves one out fails with a 400 instead of being guessed at, and no intent depends on the server guessing:
| Intent | Request |
|---|
Set phoneNumber | PUT /customers/42/profile with "phoneNumber": "555-1234" |
Clear phoneNumber | PUT /customers/42/profile with "phoneNumber": null |
Leave phoneNumber alone | Skip the profile PUT, or resend its current value |
| Remove one tag | DELETE /customers/42/tags/beta |
email fails only the workflow test, which is enough, because the verification rules then live on the one endpoint that triggers them. isActive fails on owner and scope, so it becomes a named operation, and a deactivation can no longer ride along with a phone-number change because there's no body to carry it.
Collections With Identity Get Their Own Addresses
Collections whose elements carry identity get addressed individually, the way GitHub's REST API handles issue labels and Stripe's API exposes subscription items.
A collection with no natural key, like an ordered list of steps, stays in its parent's body and is replaced whole with it.
What Normalizing Costs
More Calls, Usually Along Lines the Work Already Follows
The objection is usually raised for admin and operations apps, on the assumption that they edit everything at once. They tend not to. Their work moves from correcting contact details to reviewing access to deactivating an account, and each step is a write this design already names.
The customer screen is the harder case, because it shows every concern on one page. A single Save button now makes one call per concern it touches plus one per tag, and has to report which ones failed. A screen shaped like the write surface tends to serve users better, with contact details saved together and email change and deactivation as their own actions. Nielsen Norman Group's toggle-switch guidelines already say a switch "should take immediate effect and should not require the user to click Save or Submit," and tag chips often save one at a time. A single Save that carries a deactivation along with a phone-number edit is the wide write again, moved into the interface.
Call count does hurt clients that write in volume, like an offline app syncing a day of edits or an importer loading thousands of customers. They need a batch endpoint, not the wide body back. In the style of Microsoft Graph's JSON batching, each entry carries its own method, URL, and body and gets its own status, so it passes through the rules of the endpoint it names without quietly turning the batch into a transaction.
Atomicity Across Concerns Has to Be Named
A single wide update usually applies all or nothing, and separate calls don't, so a save across contact details and tags can fail halfway. As long as the server validates each write against current state, every successful call leaves a valid customer, so a failure leaves an incomplete edit rather than a corrupt record.
Separate calls stop being enough when writes are only valid together. Closing an account deactivates the customer and cancels their subscriptions, and a deactivated customer who's still billed has to be impossible. That's a use case, and it gets a named operation, POST /customers/42/close.
That can sound like a return to RPC, the endpoint-per-action style that resource-oriented APIs replaced. But the wide update never removed those actions. It hid them in field values, so "isActive": false is a deactivation command the handler detects by comparing against the stored value. A normalized surface is still mostly GET and PUT on resources, with named operations kept for transitions, the way Stripe's API finalizes invoices and GitHub's API merges pull requests. An operation earns a name when the business needs its writes to succeed together, not when a screen happens to save several things at once.
Concurrent Edits Surface as Conflicts Instead of Merging
If one agent changes displayName while another changes phoneNumber, two PUTs to the profile each send both fields, and the later one overwrites the earlier change. A partial update would keep both, but only with the change tracking clients rarely manage, and even then merging by field can save a combination neither agent saw.
The usual guard is a version check. A GET on the profile returns a version tag in its ETag header, the client sends that tag back in an If-Match header on the PUT, and if the resource changed in between, the server answers 412 Precondition Failed instead of overwriting. A server that requires the header answers 428 Precondition Required, defined in RFC 6585, when it's missing, so a client that forgets it finds out on its first request.
Small resources make that check practical. On the wide customer, a tag another agent adds fails every save that loaded the customer before it. On the profile, a 412 means someone changed the same details at the same time, which is rare and should reach the user.
Adding a Writable Field Changes the Contract
If preferredName joins the profile, an older client's PUT leaves it out, and the server either clears it or rejects the request. Under replacement, a new writable field breaks every client that writes the resource, so it takes a new version, with the old request type bound to the old version so its requests never touch preferredName.
A partial update skips the version by treating missing as leave alone, the rule that stopped the phone number from being cleared. Normalizing keeps versions rare instead, because reads gain fields freely and a field with its own owner, scope, or workflow gets its own resource. Versions fall only on fields that join an existing concern, and a resource that gains those every release is a document that belongs with partial updates.
Migration Runs Alongside the Wide Write
Partners already calling the wide update can't simply start getting 405. The narrow endpoints go in alongside it, and clients move over screen by screen. Meanwhile the wide update has to route each field through its narrow endpoint's rules, or it becomes a back door. Once its traffic stops, /customers/42 keeps serving the composed view and answers writes with 405 and Allow: GET.
Three Failures Behind One Wide Write
I've come to think most software problems trace back to a failure to align with the need, a failure of architecture governance, or a failure to change direction. The wide write shows all three, in adopting a spec written for someone else's clients, in letting the read model decide a write surface nobody owned, and in special-casing each ambiguous field instead of changing the design.
On a normalized surface, every body carries all of its fields, every field has one place to be written, and no handler has to guess what a missing property meant. None of the corrections takes new technology:
- Group fields into a writable resource only when they share an owner, an authorization scope, and a workflow
- Replace those resources whole with PUT, requiring every field in the body
- Give collections with identity-bearing elements their own POST and DELETE endpoints
- Name the operation when a change is a state transition or has to be atomic across concerns
- Require
If-Match on PUTs to resources more than one person edits
- Version a writable resource when it gains a field, and let reads grow freely
- Move existing clients onto the narrow endpoints, then let aggregate URLs answer GET and refuse writes
- Save partial updates and patch formats for documents, like preference bags and large configurations