RESTful way to send commands

Question

How do you send "commands" to a RESTful server?

Use case: My server caches certain information so that it does not have to read the database every time that information is requested. I need a way to send a command from my client application to tell the server to flush the cache. Would you use POST or PUT on some URL like ".../flush_cache"?

The "command" is not really data that needs "Representational State Transfer", unless the state being transferred is the result of the command -- "switch is off", "cache is flushed", etc. As a general rule, how does REST send commands to the server?

Answer 1

I have come across such a situation a lot in a past project. Since REST is well...about resource, it is not always clear how to deal with things that are Really RPC in nature.

An easy way to get around this is to think of it as the bureaucratic part of rest, the request can be a resource itself :

1 . "You want to trigger a command on my server ? first fill this form I90292 and send it to us" :

POST /bureaucracy/command-request  Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: ... 

2. "Ok we will see what we can do. your case number is 999"

   201 Created (or 202 Accepted as per Kugel's comment) Location /bureaucracy/command-request/999

3. And then the client checks regularly

   GET /bureaucracy/command-request/999

Hopefully he gets a response like the following

200 OK <command-request>   <number>999</number>   ...   <result>Success</result> </command-request> 

Of course if the bureaucratic service has great customer care it would offer the customer to call him when it is done if he wants :
"You want to trigger a command on our server? Kindly fill this form and send it to us. Note that you can join your contact info so we can call you when it is done"

POST /bureaucracy/command-request?callback=client.com/bureaucracy/inbox  

Or as a custom http header X-Callback: http://client.com/bureaucracy/inbox