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Asked: 2026-05-26T11:37:40+00:00

I have resources like this /entities # GET, POST /entities/<id> # GET, PUT, DELETE

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I have resources like this

/entities        # GET, POST
/entities/<id>   # GET, PUT, DELETE

GET /entities gets the list of all entities.
Now I want to poll for updates. The case for a single entity is straight forward:

GET /entities/2
If-Modified-Since: <http date>

The list is tricky. I want the response to be a list of entities, updated or created since a given point in time. I’d intuitively use

GET /entities
Range: after <http date>

Which is a valid request by HTTP specification http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.35.2 . But the spec also mandates a 206 Partial Content response, which has to include a Content-Range header. A Content-Range header, in turn, mandates a byte range to be specified http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.16 . This is obviously very inconvenient for my use case.

How would you request a semantic range over HTTP?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From reading section 14.35.1, I would say that the Range header is used to request a specific range of bytes from a resource, not to request a group of entities according to when they were modified.

    In this case, I believe you should treat your range as a filter and pass the date as a query string parameter:

    GET /entities?modified-since=<date>
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