I have a middle tier which performs CRUD operations on a shared database. When I converted the product to .NET Core I thought I'd also look at using REST for the API as CRUD is supposed to be what it does well. It seems like REST is a great solution for single record operations, but what happens when I want to delete, say, 1,000 records?
Every professional multi-user application is going to have some concept of Optimistic Concurrency checking: you can't have one user wipe out the work of another user without some feedback. As I understand it, REST handles this with the HTTP ETag header record. If the ETag send by the client doesn't match the server's tag, then you issue a 412 Precondition Failed. So far, so good. But what do I use when I want to delete 1,000 records? The back-and-forth time for 1,000 individual calls is considerable, so how would REST handle a batch operation that involved Optimistic Concurrency?