Question

As I understand, the RESTful convention is for POSTs creating a resource to return the full or annotated created entity, however it’s been my experience that this entity is usually discarded unless the service itself or the client is being tested.

I’m not a slave to REST when creating public facing APIs especially when I deem that for usability or architectural reasons it doesn’t make sense, but one thing I’ve always wondered about and never done is returning 204 No Content from POSTs creating new entities (especially ones that are large in size). This can cut down on bandwidth for users making a lot of requests and make responses on my end faster.

Is this an acceptable practice or does it make you die a little inside? Note that I wouldn’t consider this without providing an endpoint to retrieve this entity for testing reasons.

EDIT: I’m looking for anecdotal observations or concrete examples of why this particular use case might be harmful, even if it was well documented.

Answer 1

The document you linked to has the answer to the question you are askign:

If a resource has been created on the origin server, the response
SHOULD be 201 (Created) and contain an entity which describes the
status of the request and refers to the new resource, and a Location
header (see section 14.30).

Responses to this method are not cacheable, unless the response
includes appropriate Cache-Control or Expires header fields. However,
the 303 (See Other) response can be used to direct the user agent to
retrieve a cacheable resource.