RESTful Dynamic Forms

One of the key characteristics of RESTful web services is (application) "statelessness". That is, all application state should be stored on the client-end and send over with every request.

Sometimes clients are asked to manipulate forms dynamically, adding or removing elements, before submitting it to the server. Typically the client uses "sessionId" to manipulate the page across multiple requests.

If you take a step back, however, you will realize that this application state doesn't belong on the server at all. The server doesn't really care about the intermediate page states, which is why it doesn't persist them to the database in the first place. It only cares about the initial page state (which it sends to the client) and the final page state (which it saves to the database). The server manipulates the page state on behalf of the client because it's easier to implement business logic in modern programming languages than it is to implement them in Javascript on the client. Ideally the client should download the page, manipulate it on its end, and submit the result to the server.