Http DELETE with parameters using Jersey

Question

I have code that contains several different DELETE methods, one of which takes a parameter, or at least ideally it would take a parameter. However when I make this request, either through CURL or through a web client, it doesn't work. The other DELETE requests function fine and I've hard-coded in the parameter that I want to pass just to see if the call works and it does. I've tried this with both PathParam and QueryParam and neither works. Here's how I'm using the PathParams, which I'm pretty sure is correct, QueryParams looks very similar so I don't want to post that too.

@DELETE
@Path("/byId/{id}")
public void deleteById(@PathParam("id") String id)

And then essentially the same thing for QueryParams but obviously the path is different

From what I understand a lot of RESTful APIs ignore any kind of request body with a DELETE request, or treat it as a PUT or POST. Is there any way around this? Basically I have a database that contains several objects and I need to delete one based on a unique identifier, to be passed in by the client. If there is no way around this is there some other way that I could do it?

Its possible that I'm missing something obvious here as I've only been using Jersey for a few weeks now and up to this point had never even heard of the concept of RESTful services.

Answer 1

You can send information to a RESTful service as either headers, path param, query param or message body.

If all the values go through as expected there is no problem with jax-rs/jersey. Now you need to debug the code and fix your implementation. jax-rs will only match a DELETE call with the DELETE http method you have implemented.

It is then your responsibility to actually perform a DELETE operation of the resource within the method. jax-rs or jersey is not going to complain if you do not DELETE or if you do some other action within the method.