Partial document update based on JSON Patch
Author: steve-chavezCreated Jan 16, 2024Updated Aug 24, 2026
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Problem
Currently there's no way to do a partial document update.
- https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/465#issuecomment-1198884375 discusses json patch but there are certain operations (like
test) which don't make much sense given our horizontal filtering. - An alternative is proposed on https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/465#issuecomment-1199858002, but it's flexibility makes it harder to implement. Additionally it's not isolated to a single content type.
Solution
Use a vendored media type based on json patch where we support the operations we lack. As prior art, azure cosmosdb json patch (also see here) does a similar thing and adds support for increment and set, which are not defined in the JSON Patch RFC.
For starters, we can add support for increment. Like so:
PATCH /items?id=eq.1
Content-Type: application/vnd.pgrst.json-patch
[
{ "op": "incr", "path": "/inventory", "value": 10 },
]Path would refer to any column and the generated SQL would be like UPDATE items SET inventory = inventory + 10.
Later on we can extend this to add other operations, like mult, div, concat, etc.
Source: PostgREST/postgrest