Partially Updating a Resource

1

Hi everyone,

I noticed in DSTU3 they introduced a spec for partially updating a resource with uses the HTTP PATCH command. See: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/http.html#patch. This a rather complicated approach to deal with mainly on the server side. Would it be possible to use a different approach? Something like the old HL7 V2 way of dealing with the problem, basically if the client doesn’t support the field then leave it blank, but if it does support the field and it’s value has been deleted then it should supply two double quotes ("").

Any thoughts?

2

then how would you delete something for real? how would you remove something from a list?

Patch is a little more complicated, but it’s very precise.