use existing _id if present when creating document

[anamba]

I found this helpful in my own app. But I'm new to CouchDB, so let me know if this is not a good practice.

[Schniz]

Hey @anamba, and sorry that no one answered you yet!
I agree about the terminology being wrong. I believe it should support taking _id as a parameter and actually use it. But I also think that this can lead to an unexpected behavior:

client.create_document("test", {_id: "a", message: "hello"})
client.create_document("test", {_id: "a", message: "world"}) # will it throw? will it overwrite the data?

I'd say we don't want to overwrite, and that throwing an error is what we'd want to do. This will complicate create_document, which practically just maps itself to POST /#{db}. On the other hand, if we'll use client#update_document:

client.update_document("test", {_id: "a", message: "hello"})
client.update_document("test", {_id: "a", message: "world"}) # makes sense!

[anamba]

Both #create_document and #update_document PUT to a url that includes the id, so you're right, I suppose I could just use update_document and pass my own id. Just feels a little odd.

Either way, I'm thinking the presence or absence of _rev should take care of the issue you mentioned.