为什么在HTTP DELETE请求中包含实体主体不是一个好习惯？

Question

I am working with Restful Web Services using Java and JAX-RS and I came across the issue of sending a DELETE request with an entity body.

I spent a couple of hours looking for a way to send a DELETE request with a message in the body but the only thing that I found was a work around using the Apache HttpClient .

Some of the answers I found are saying that it does not make sense to have a body in DELETE requests and as I see it many servers are supporting this by not allowing a DELETE with body. eg " entity enclosing DELETE requests make no sense "

So my question is why it is not a good practice to have a body in a DELETE request? What is the drawback on this?

Thanks

Answer 1

The DELETE method requests that the origin server delete the resource identified by the Request-URI. and every resource on web server is identified by only URI. thats why it does not make sense to have body in DELETE

Answer 2

REST is noisy, and it is likely that a separate DELETE call for each resource was the intent. For a limited number of ids, you could use a query param on the collection resource:

DELETE /widgets?id=1,2,4,16,256

In general, you should be able to use query params as filters on a DELETE of a collection just like you would on a GET of that collection.