Use DELETE request for not purely deletion in REST

Question

I have a dilemma regarding the design of my REST API in Spring.

Situation

There is DELETE request to delete users by calling DELETE: /v1/api/users/{userId} , but it is not purely user deletion, i have to re-assign user tickets to another active user before deletion.

User A has 5 tickets, when i delete User A, all of his/her tickets will be re-assigned to another selected user, then user A is being deleted from the system.

My Initial Proposal

I use the most simple solution

DELETE: /v1/api/users/{userIds}

And also with the following to accept id for re-assignment

@RequestBody int assigneeId

My Dilemma

My gut tells me that this is not a good way to design a DELETE request API, delete should just do what delete should do, i thought it for long time but can't figure out an elegant way to do so. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Let's imagine you have cases associated to a user.

I would build a rest API like that:

GET    /v1/api/user            : Return all users
GET    /v1/api/user/{id}       : Return a user
POST   /v1/api/user            : Add a user
PUT    /v1/api/user/{id}       : Update a user
DELETE /v1/api/user/{id}       : Delete a user
GET    /v1/api/user/{id}/case  : Get user's cases
PUT    /v1/api/user/{id}/case  : Reassign user's cases to another user [{id}]

If a client makes a call to DELETE /v1/api/user/{id} and this user has cases assign to him. You can return an HTTP code 409 CONFLICT indicating you can't delete because of inherited objects. The client will have to PUT /v1/api/user/{id}/case to associate these cases to somebody else.