CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rest
bruno
bruno

Reputation: 2273

Is it RESTful do DELETE collections?

Some say it's "often not desirable" for a REST server to allow the DELETEion of the entire collection of entities.

DELETE http://www.example.com/customers

Is this a real rule for achieving RESTful nirvana?

And what about sub-collections, defined by query parameters?

DELETE http://www.example.com/customers?gender=m

Upvotes: 1

Views: 299

Answers (2)

joshp
joshp

Reputation: 1892

The answer to this depends more on the requirements and risks of your application than on the inherent RESTfulness of either construct.

It's "not often desirable" to delete an entire collection if you imagine the collection as something with enduring importance like a customer list. It doesn't break with some essential REST wisdom.

If the collection contains information that a user should be able to delete, and potentially a lot of such information, DELETE of the entire collection can be the nicest REST-ish way to go, rather than run a lot of individual DELETEs.

Deleting based on criteria (e.g. the query parameter) is so essential to some applications that if the REST police declared it Officially UnRESTful I would continue to do it without shame.

Upvotes: 1

ZachB
ZachB

Reputation: 15366

(They actually say "not often desirable," which one might interpret slightly differently than "often not desirable.")

Yes, it's RESTful. If you have a valid use case, it's fine to do it. Your second scenario (deleting with a query) is frequently useful, and can be an easy way to reduce the number of HTTP requests the client has to make.

Edit: as @peeskillet says, do consider if you actually want to delete something, versus change some flag on the record (e.g. "active").

Upvotes: 0

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