How to delete list of items with REST API

Question

I'm wondering about deletion of bunch items using REST API. But I can't find right way. I'm implementing this just by POST method. And it seems as deviation from REST nature. Is there some way with DELETE method for deletion of a collection?

Check this question : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21863326/delete-multiple-records-using-rest — Milad Alshomary, Sep 18 '15 at 10:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 07 '21 at 11:21

I see two ways to do that with REST:

If you want to delete all the elements, you can use the method DELETE on a list resource itself. For example: DELETE /contacts/ will remove all contacts.
If you to delete only a subset, you can leverage the PATCH method and the JSON PATCH format (see http://jsonpatch.com/ and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6902) to specify which elements to delete. Here is a sample:
```
  PATCH /contacts
  [
    { "op": "remove", "path": "/contacts/1" },
    { "op": "remove", "path": "/contacts/2" },
    { "op": "remove", "path": "/contacts/3" }
  ]
```

The following could give you some hints: https://templth.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/implementing-bulk-updates-within-restful-services/.

Hope it helps you, Thierry

How to delete list of items with REST API

1 Answers1