I am still in the process of getting comfortable with doing things the REST way.
In my situation, client software will be interacting with a RESTful service. Rarely, the client will upload its entire database of entities (each entity serializes into a roughly 5kb chunk of xml).
Perhaps I'm wrong, but the proper RESTful strategy seems to be to cycle through each entity and individually POST each one. However, there may plausibly be tens of thousands of these entities, and somehow so many rapid-fire POSTs doesn't seem kosher.
In this situation, it feels like packaging all the entities into one big xml representation would violate the RESTful way of doing things, but it would also avoid the need for thousands of POSTs.
Is there some standard-practice for accomplishing this? Thanks in advance!
There are at least two problems here which prevent you from being RESTful.
Each resource needs to be identified by a URI. Acting on the resource means that you must call the URI using an HTTP call. Consequently, you cannot call multiple actions in multiple resources in just one HTTP call.
The resources are identified by nouns and represent entities. This implies that to insert an Employee and a Car you need to call two different resources for each of the respective entities.
So in summation you cannot take a purely RESTful approach here. However, REST is designed to help by way of conventions, not constrict you. The best solution here is for you to create a custom action which does what you need.
Alternately, you can create a generic wrapper entity with INSERT, UPDATE and other actions which take in blobs of disparate data as XML. However, this will undermine your other end points because now it becomes possible to insert a Car record through the generic wrapper and through the /Car/ URI.
Without knowing much about your actual requirements, I would suggest you don't expose this functionality via REST specifically. Behind the scenes you could still call your INSERT action methods within the various Controllers once you break up the incoming collection if disparate objects.