title: Partial Entity Updates in WebAPI PUT/POST
body: <p>Say you have a repository method to update a Document: </p>
  
  <pre><code>public Document UpdateDocument(Document document)
    {
    Document serverDocument = _db.Documents.Find(document.Id);
    serverDocument.Title = document.Title;
    serverDocument.Content = document.Content;
    _db.SaveChanges();
    return serverDocument;
    }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In this case, the entity has two properties.  When updating a Document, both of these properties are required in the JSON request, so a request to <code>PUT /api/folder</code> with a body of </p>
  
  <pre><code>{
    "documentId" = "1",
    "title" = "Updated Title"
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>would return an error because "content" was not provided.  The reason I'm doing this is because, even for nullable properties and properties that the user doesn't update, it seems safer to force the client to specify these fields in the request to avoid overwriting unspecified fields with nulls serverside.  </p>
  
  <p><strong>This has led me to the practice of always requiring every updatable property in PUT and POST requests, even if it means specifying null for those properties.</strong>  </p>
  
  <p>Is this cool, or is there a pattern/practice that I haven't learned about yet that might facilitate partial updates by sending only what is needed over the wire?  </p>