Is there a way to make CosmosDB Data Explorer respect ETag when updating a document in the browser?

Alfred Kristal 20

Hi,

I would like to be able to manually update certain things in my CosmosDB container without having to worry about an application potentially overwriting the change/having its change overwritten by me. I tried this with two browsers by opening the same document in them both, then writing with first one and then the other. Both went through, but my expectation was that the second write would cause an error since there was an ETag mismatch. Is there any way I can set Data Explorer to behave like this?

Thanks!
Alfred

Vijayalaxmi Kattimani 740 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-12-12T15:11:11.8033333+00:00
Hi @Alfred Kristal,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.

Azure Cosmos DB provides etag based optimistic concurrency handling. In your scenario, you have included If-Match request header with the document's _etag property value. If the value matches with the etag value of the document on the server, the update will succeed otherwise it will fail.

Azure CosmosDB Data Explorer in the Azure portal does not inherently enforce the ETag for concurrency checks when updating documents directly in the browser. This is because it performs updates without explicitly including the If-Match header, which is necessary to enforce ETag concurrency.

You can follow the below mentioned steps in order to avoid optimistic concurrency of ETag using Data Explorer:

Open Data Explorer and navigate to the container that contains the document you want to update.

Click the document to view its JSON representation. Modify some fields in the JSON.

Simulate open another session or browser tab and navigating to the same document, Modify different fields in the JSON of this session.

In the first session, save your changes. In the second session, try saving changes to the same document. If the second session does not reload the document after the first session's save, its changes will overwrite those from the first session, as the default behaviour in Data Explorer ignores ETag. This highlights the absence of optimistic concurrency, as the If-Match header with the ETag value is not automatically used.

Please refer to the below mentioned link:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/nosql/database-transactions-optimistic-concurrency#optimistic-concurrency-control

I hope this information helps. Please do let us know if you have any further queries.
Alfred Kristal 20 Reputation points

2024-12-12T15:20:56.2233333+00:00

Hi,

Thanks for answering. I might have been a little unclear, but I am aware that this seems to be the default behavior. My question was basically: can I set the browser based Cosmos DB Data Explorer to provide the ETag in the If-Match header in order to detect a potential conflict and avoid overwriting any potential conflicting changes? Is this something that the browser based Cosmos DB Data Explorer client supports?
Vijayalaxmi Kattimani 740 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2024-12-13T14:09:21.6366667+00:00

Hi @Alfred Kristal,

We are reaching out to the internal team to get more information related to your query and will get back to you as soon as we have an update.

Thank you,

Accepted answer

ShaktiSingh-MSFT 16,086 Reputation points

2024-12-17T05:13:44.2933333+00:00

Hi @Alfred Kristal,

We have checked with the internal team and received below reply:

This feature didn’t work because there is nothing in the data explorer code that is explicitly throwing an error for conflicts, and by default “last write wins” in a race condition.

Doing an ETag If-Match check is not natively supported in Cosmos DB data explorer, but its an interesting feature suggestion.

We encourage you to raise a feature request as a GitHub issue for data explorer: https://github.com/Azure/cosmos-explorer/issues

OR over

Feedback Channel Azure Cosmos DB: Azure Cosmos DB · Community

Thanks for posting question over Q&A forum.
Please sign in to rate this answer.

0 comments No comments
Sign in to comment

Use comments to ask for clarification, additional information, or improvements to the question.

Share via

Is there a way to make CosmosDB Data Explorer respect ETag when updating a document in the browser?

0 additional answers

Your answer