Restful way for deleting a bunch of items

Question

In wiki article for REST it is indicated that if you use http://example.com/resources DELETE, that means you are deleting the entire collection.

If you use http://ex

Answer 1

Here's what Amazon did with their S3 REST API.

Individual delete request:

DELETE /ObjectName HTTP/1.1
Host: BucketName.s3.amazonaws.com
Date: date
Content-Length: length
Authorization: authorization string (see Authenticating Requests (AWS Signature Version 4))

Multi-Object Delete request:

POST /?delete HTTP/1.1
Host: bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com
Authorization: authorization string
Content-Length: Size
Content-MD5: MD5



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But Facebook Graph API, Parse Server REST API and Google Drive REST API go even further by enabling you to "batch" individual operations in one request.

Here's an example from Parse Server.

Individual delete request:

curl -X DELETE \
  -H "X-Parse-Application-Id: ${APPLICATION_ID}" \
  -H "X-Parse-REST-API-Key: ${REST_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.parse.com/1/classes/GameScore/Ed1nuqPvcm

Batch request:

curl -X POST \
  -H "X-Parse-Application-Id: ${APPLICATION_ID}" \
  -H "X-Parse-REST-API-Key: ${REST_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "requests": [
          {
            "method": "POST",
            "path": "/1/classes/GameScore",
            "body": {
              "score": 1337,
              "playerName": "Sean Plott"
            }
          },
          {
            "method": "POST",
            "path": "/1/classes/GameScore",
            "body": {
              "score": 1338,
              "playerName": "ZeroCool"
            }
          }
        ]
      }' \
  https://api.parse.com/1/batch