Should I be using a PUT or POST in this situation?

Question

A server side service is populating the database. I send a http request from my application with some metadata information from the document and I want the server side service to generate a unique uuid for this document and populate the db with the doc uuid and metadata and send back the uuid to me. Should the client be executing a PUT request in this case or a POST. I only want one record of the document metadata and uuid generated for it.

Answer 1

PUT is generally used to overwrite and replace or create a resource.

I think that is what you should be using here. For example:

PUT /document/ HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

And have it return a UUID and metadata for the document.

And quoting from another SO question:

I think one cannot stress enough the fact that PUT is idempotent: if the network is botched and the client is not sure whether his request made it through, it can just send it a second (or 100th) time, and it is guaranteed by the HTTP spec that this has exactly the same effect as sending once.