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

I suggest you include the required metadata as part of the URI hierarchy itself. An example (Naive):

If you need to delete entries based on a date range, instead of passing the start date and end date in body or as query parameters, structure the URI such a way that you pass the required information as part of the URI.

e.g.

DELETE /entries/range/01012012/31122012 -- Delete all entries between 01 January 2012 to 31st December 2012

Hope this helps.