Is there a programming term for selecting or inserting similar to "upsert"?

Question

Is there a programming term for a widget/service that has the ability to either select an existing item or create/insert a new item? Maybe like how "upsert" is a combination of updating existing or inserting new?

Edit

Sorry, maybe my use of "upsert" as an example term is causing confusion. I'm looking for a term that describes (selecting or creating), not (creating or updating). For example, a widget that can query existing contacts to assign to a company, but also allows ad-hoc creation of contacts as well. I'm hoping to use the term in the name of such widgets to succinctly describe their function.

Answer 1

In web services based on representational state transfer (REST), the PUT method has semantics which can mean create or modify. Based on this, I would propose put as a possibility.

This also happens to match Java usage of the word: consider the put method on Hashtable. It maps a key to a value and returns the old value corresponding to the key, if it existed. This implies it can either exist or not already, and the action will succeed. Mozilla uses the same semantics for put on IDBObjectStore accessed in JavaScript.

It seems like where put is used for updating a collection, it typically has the meaning of create or update.

Based on the clarification - something like provide, specify, define or identify might be acceptable options for communicating the contents of a collection created by giving existing instances and/or creating new ones on the spot. That is, I can provide, specify, define or identify a real number by making reference to some well-known ones (pi, sqrt(2), etc.) or by creating a new one (e.g., by listing some digits or describing how it is computed).