[Rails] API design for batch updates

Hi,

I'm adding an API to a Rails app where clients will be able to create
records on the DB. I've been reading around but didn't find a good set
of characteristics that the API should have. These are the things I have
in mind.

- Access controlled by token and over ssl
- Versioned so I can improve it safely
- REST based (though I'm not obsessed with it, the scope of the API is
quite reduced and affects just 2 resources in exactly the same way)
- I will limit the content length to avoid too big request and force
clients to breakdown the requests if needed

Using the API the users will be able to create, modify or delete two
types of very basic resources. Updates and deletes are not expected to
be very frequent actions anyway.

For example for a create action I'll take JSON arrays included in the
request body as input from the clients:

{
"entries": [
{ "ind_id":11 , "elem_id":22, "value":33.44, "scope":"22-2012" },
{ "ind_id":13 , "elem_id":null, "value":35.45, "scope":"22-2012" },
{ "ind_id":14 , "elem_id":24, "value":63.44, "scope":"22-2012" },
{ "ind_id":15 , "elem_id":25, "value":73.74, "scope":"22-2012" }
]
}

My questions and worries:

- Initially I thought of creating an array of hashes and pass that to
the create method. But a simple test showed me that if one fails the
rest go through and I don't get any straight indication of which one
failed. So I think I should get all the items in one post and planned
but then create the records one by one, that way I can collect data if
any fails and report back to the clients. Is that a bad idea?

- I guess there should be a background job taking care of inserting the
records to the DB, I'm not sure how would I communicate back with the
client?


Any good hints regarding this topic?

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