I’ve read that you should not use GET requests if you are modifying the database. How would you record analytics about your website then?
For example, I want to record page views whenever someone visits a page. I would need to update views = views + 1 in the database. Is this OK, despite using a GET request, or is there another technique? Surely, not every request should be a POST request.
The general advice about how to use POST vs. GET shows up in RFC 1945 from 23 years ago:
The GET method means retrieve whatever information (in the form of an entity) is identified by the Request-URI.
POST is designed to allow a uniform method to cover the following functions:
- Annotation of existing resources;
- Posting a message to a bulletin board, newsgroup, mailing list, or similar group of articles;
- Providing a block of data, such as the result of submitting a form [3], to a data-handling process;
- Extending a database through an append operation.
These guidelines remain in effect to this day, but they cover the primary purpose of the user's page request.
The act of incrementing a view counter is incidental to the primary purpose of the request, which is to view the page content. Indeed, the user is likely unaware that this database update is occurring.
(Of course, you must expect that you will receive duplicate requests as users move through browser history, caches are populated, or spiders crawl your pages. This wouldn't be the case if a POST request was made.)