Multipart AtomPub Upload

AtomPub does not say anything about how to handle POST requests with multipart/related content. the recently published draft-gregorio-atompub-multipart (the first version was published may 1) changes this and specifies how to handle multipart/related POST requests, and how to advertise the capability of a collection to handle these kinds of uploads in the service document.

this functionality makes a lot of sense for various scenarios, blogs are a popular example, where a blog post often consists of the actual text along with additional images. being able to upload all of that not only is more efficient, it also makes it easier to deal with the fact that such an upload should be one transaction. one could even argue that this functionality allows AtomPub to handle compound documents, but rather than having an explicit format for describing them, they are bundled in a message format.

i have added this draft to my Atom Landscape Overview and hope it will become successful. seeing how Atom and AtomPub can continually evolve because of their extensible design is good; on the other hand i am wondering whether this creates the risk of many non-interoperable AtomPub implementations, because they all implement different sets of optional extensions.

Comments

[Peter Keane]

Hi Erik-

This specification is somewhat more limited in functionality than you describe. It is meant to specify how you post a media file to an AtomPub "media collection" and send along some metadata with that. It is not meant to describe a way to upload multiple files -- just one file plus some metadata in atom format. This would typically NOT be a blog post, since the AtomPub model talks about "Entry" resources and "Media" resources. This spec only deals with media resources.

It's a good and necessary spec, but it is limited in scope. How one posts to an "Entry" collection with media cargo that will go into a "Media" collection AND be linked from the new entry remains to be figured out. It's why I have been looking at Media RSS and Google feedLink as possible ways to express a collection of media that is nested in an Entry.

best regards-
Peter Keane