RESTful Alternatives to DELETE Request Body

Question

While the HTTP 1.1 spec seems to allow message bodies on DELETE requests, it seems to indicate that servers should ignore it since there are no defined semantics fo

Answer 1

What you seem to want is one of two things, neither of which are a pure DELETE:

1. You have two operations, a PUT of the delete reason followed by a DELETE of the resource. Once deleted, the contents of the resource are no longer accessible to anyone. The 'reason' cannot contain a hyperlink to the deleted resource. Or,
2. You are trying to alter a resource from state=active to state=deleted by using the DELETE method. Resources with state=deleted are ignored by your main API but might still be readable to an admin or someone with database access. This is permitted - DELETE doesn't have to erase the backing data for a resource, only to remove the resource exposed at that URI.

Any operation which requires a message body on a DELETE request can be broken down into at it's most general, a POST to do all the necessary tasks with the message body, and a DELETE. I see no reason to break the semantics of HTTP.