Please add support for the QUERY HTTP method

[gdubicki]

On 2025-01-07 the QUERY HTTP method, "a safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content." has reached the level of a Proposed Standard consensus and is on track to become a Proposed Standard.

It solves the problem of making complex queries where the GET method is sometimes sufficient as it (according to the standard) lacks support for sending the query in the body, leaving only the query part of the URL which is limited. An often used workaround of using the POST method has a downside in that it's just the wrong method for this purpose as queries do not cause side-effects and this limits the retryabilty and cacheability of such queries.

Therefore It would be great to implement support for QUERY in Faraday.

If you are open to it, I am interested in providing a PR.

[gdubicki]

Related: drbrain/net-http-persistent#153 and ruby/net-http#202.

[iMacTia]

Hi @gdubicki and thank you for opening this! I personally really like this proposal and hope it will make it into a standard.

With that said, I'm cautious about giving the green light about adding this into Faraday just yet.
Adding a new method would be a non-trivial amount of effort and it would require maintenance going forward.

On top of that, the current stage of the proposal is, according to the IETF official documentation, far from a guarantee that it will make it into a final standard as

Proposed Standard (PS). The first official stage. Many standards never progress beyond this level.

With that in mind, I'd prefer waiting a little bit more, until the proposal makes into the "Internet Standard" status or is extremely close to that.

I'll keep this issue open so that we can track progress and decide if a when we get to the point where it makes sense to introduce the new method. Please feel free to nudge this issue in future as things evolve 🙂

[gdubicki]

Thanks for a prompt reply, @iMacTia!

However I am very sorry to mislead you, but I did get overexcited and missed that the document in question has NOT reached a Proposed Standard level yet, but only its Intended Status was set to Proposed Standard on 2025-01-07. The document itself is still an Internet-Draft. 😞

However I have also learned in the mean time that:

With that in mind, I'd prefer waiting a little bit more, until the proposal makes into the "Internet Standard" status or is extremely close to that.

• a lot of widely implemented solutions are "only" Proposed Standards - like for example the PATCH HTTP method (Proposed Standard since 2010),
• the Proposed Standard is actually a target status for many RFC - like this one - and according to RFC 7127 it should be completely ok to implement it,
• node.js already implemented QUERY support and it was released in June 2024: Support for 'QUERY' method nodejs/node#51562