Kenn Scribner

While not normally an issue with thick clients, accessing full RESTful capabilities of available services via browsers often is problematic as many (if not all) browsers only allow a form to GET or POST. They don't allow for other HTTP methods, like HEAD, PUT, or DELETE. Google realized this and offers a solution, which is to add a header to the HTTP request, X-HTTP-Method-Override, that is supposed to be interpreted by the service and acted upon regardless of the actual HTTP method used.

The header syntax is as follows:

X-HTTP-Method-Override: PUT

You can learn more about it from http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/basics.html#UpdatingEntry.

As it happens, ASP.NET MVC, version 2, supports this out of the box with the HttpHelper.HttpMethodOverride method. Just use that helper method in your view, and assuming the service honors the header, your Web page should be able to work with the RESTful service. I thought this blog entry was particularly interesting (he has an interest in using ASP.NET MVC for RESTful services as well).