Is HTTP 303 acceptable for other HTTP methods?

Question

RESTful Web Services encourages the use of HTTP 303 to redirect clients to the canonical representation of a resource. It only discusses topic in the context of HTTP GET.

Does this apply to other HTTP methods as well? If a client attempts a HTTP PUT or DELETE to a non-canonical URI, is it acceptable (and/or recommended) to return HTTP 303? What is the best practice and why?

Answer 1

I just discovered an interesting section in the book. According to page 378 section 302 ("Found"):

This status code is the ultimate source of most redirection-related confusion. It’s supposed to be handled just like 307 (“Temporary Redirect”). In fact, in HTTP 1.0 its name was “Moved Temporarily.” Unfortunately, in real life most clients handle 302 just like 303 (“See Other”). The difference hinges on what the client is supposed to do when it gets a 302 in response to a PUT, POST, or DELETE request. See the entry for 307 below if you’re interested in the details.

To resolve this ambiguity, in HTTP 1.1 this response code was renamed to “Found,” and response code 307 was created.

In other words, HTTP 302 was split into HTTP 303 and 307. Next, on page 380 section 307 ("Temporary Redirect"):

For GET requests, where the only thing being requested is that the server send a representation, this status code is identical to 303 (“See Other”). A typical case where 307 is a good response to a GET is when the server wants to send a client to a mirror site. But for POST, PUT, and DELETE requests, where the server is expected to take some action in response to the request, this status code is significantly different from 303.

A 303 in response to a POST, PUT, or DELETE means that the operation has succeeded but that the response entity-body is not being sent along with this request. If the client wants the response entity-body, it needs to make a GET request to another URI. A 307 in response to a POST, PUT, or DELETE means that the server has not even tried to perform the operation. The client needs to resubmit the entire request to the URI in the Location header.

In other words, HTTP POST, PUT, DELETE are legal on HTTP 303, 307. The above paragraph explains the expected behavior.

That being said, I'm quoting the book here, not the HTTP specification (which is suspiciously silent on the expected behavior).

Answer 2

This status code is generally applicable to any HTTP method. It is primarily used to allow the output of a POST action to redirect the user agent to a selected resource, since doing so provides the information corresponding to the POST response in a form that can be separately identified, bookmarked, and cached independent of the original request.

Source: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-21#section-7.4.4