title: Partial Updates (aka PATCH) using a $resource based service?
body: <p>We're building a web application using Django/TastyPie as the back-end REST service provider, and building an AngularJS based front end, using lots of $resource based services to CRUD objects on the server.  Everything is working great so far!  </p>
  
  <p><strong>But,</strong> we would like to reduce the amount of data that we're shipping around when we want to update only one or two changed fields on an object.  </p>
  
  <p>TastyPie supports this using the HTTP PATCH method.  We have defined a .diff() method on our objects, so we can determine which fields we want to send when we do an update.  I just can't find any documentation on how to define/implement the method on the instance object returned by $resource to do what we want.</p>
  
  <p>What we want to do is add another method to the object instances, (<a href="http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ngResource.%24resource">as described in the Angular.js documentation here</a>) like <em>myobject.$partialupdate()</em> which would:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Call our .diff() function to determine which fields to send, and then</li>
  <li>Use an HTTP PATCH request to send only those fields to the server.  </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So far, I can't find any documentation (or other SO posts) describing how to do this, but would really appreciate any suggestions that anyone might have.</p>
  
  <p>thank you.</p>