title: Bulk updating a CouchDB database without a _rev value per document?
body: <p>According to the <a href="http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_Document_API#PUT">CouchDB Wiki on PUT operations</a>.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>To update an existing document, you also issue a PUT request. In this case, the JSON body <strong>must contain a _rev property</strong>, which lets CouchDB know which revision the edits are based on. If the revision of the document currently stored in the database doesn't match, then a 409 conflict error is returned. </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>My goal is to perform a <em>bulk_docs update</em>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>curl -X POST [domain]/[couch db name]/_bulk_docs -H "Content-type: application/json" -d @[some document].json
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My workflow is like this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>My data is in an Google Docs spreadsheet.</li>
  <li>I convert the spreadsheet data to JSON by copying and pasting into <a href="http://shancarter.com/data_converter/"><em>Mr. Data Converter</em></a></li>
  <li>I use cURL (as show above) to add/update documents</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The problem is that the first time I add new documents, everything works perfectly, however the next time I post the same documents, I get following error for each document:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>...{"id":"28"," error":"conflict","reason":"Document update conflict."}...</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Is there any way to update an existing document without including a <em>_rev</em> property?</p>