Updating Data in CouchDb from c#/Asp.Net Mvc

One of my repositories is working against the REST interface of a CouchDb set of data.  Reads have been awesome, and the “Paste JSON as classes” feature of Visual Studio 2012 makes getting POCOs up and running a treat.

However I ran into the following error doing a POST to update a document in the database:

couchdb {“error”:”bad_request”,”reason”:”Referer header required.”}

For anyone working in the REST space, this will likely be an error you would never run into as you have a great handle on your HTTP verbs.  For us crossover guys – especially relational database, Asp.Net guys – this is a little harder to figure out what is going on.

I was fortunate enough to have had a conversation the other day with our partner on the project who had mentioned that we need to remember to keep our PUTs and POSTs in order.  When I saw the “bad request” message above, I knew what I was doing wrong, especially after having a great conversation about REST with Darrel Miller earlier this year.

When a document exists in CouchDb you send updates to the document URL with a PUT. To create a new entry, you use a POST to the document container and CouchDb will determine the newly created item’s URL.

Here is a generic method to update a document from c#:

Via Gist: