Subject: Clarification of HTTP Delete rules

From: Grahame Grieve <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 06:30:24 +1000

in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.7 it says:

   The DELETE method requests that the origin server delete the resource
   identified by the Request-URI.

So you can issue DELETE /document/by/id which deletes a resource.

But can you legally do this?

DELETE /document?param=some value

where multiple entities that can get a subject of a GET request
individually can be deleted - whatever match the query parameters. Are the
words "the resource" meant to exclude this use or not?

thanks
Grahame

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From: Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 14:47:01 +0900

Hello Grahame,

The current definition of DELETE is at
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.5. It contains some more 
explanations about where DELETE is useful/appropriate.

As far as I understand, there's no fundamental problem with using query 
parts in an URI in a DELETE request. A somewhat plausible example 
matching the explanation in RFC 7231 would be
DELETE /document?page=15

But you shouldn't expect something to be widely supported, neither on 
the client side nor on the server side.

Regards,   Martin.

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From: Grahame Grieve <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 15:57:36 +1000

Thanks

Indeed it won't be widely supported, but I have a community that wants to
use it

Grahame

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> parts in an URI in a DELETE request. A somewhat plausible example matching
> the explanation in RFC 7231 would be
> DELETE /document?page=15
>
> But you shouldn't expect something to be widely supported, neither on the
> client side nor on the server side.
>
> Regards,   Martin.
>
>