REST, Internet Explorer and the banned DELETE method

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all

As we all know, in REST the ResourceController#delete action is called by calling "/resources/:id" with a delete method. But, the delete method is not supported in IE. This seems like a problem to me. How do people get around this, typically? I can think of various ways around it but they all seem a bit bodgy and i'd like to know some other approaches or even if there's something really obvious that i'm missing.

2

Hi, You just cat you following in your view: <%= link_to 'Destroy', photo, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %> and it appear in browser to that: <a onclick="if (confirm('Are you sure?')) { var f = document.createElement('form'); f.style.display = 'none'; this.parentNode.appendChild(f); f.method = 'POST'; f.action = this.href;var m = document.createElement('input'); m.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); m.setAttribute('name', '_method'); m.setAttribute('value', 'delete'); f.appendChild(m);var s = document.createElement('input'); s.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); s.setAttribute('name', 'authenticity_token'); s.setAttribute('value', 'LgNwcxaXQ3+NT95f1SJYo1ZOUfXMFtQimzSzDmjJM3g='); f.appendChild(s);f.submit(); };return false;" href="/photos/ 51">Destroy</a>

as you can see its still post, but it has hidden input that tells your controller about delete.

3

*your just CAN ADD (sorry for this typo)....

4

by the way, the same story about PUT

<form method="post" id="edit_photo_51" class="edit_photo" action="/ photos/51">       <div style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; display: inline;">           <input type="hidden" value="put" name="_method">            <input type="hidden" value="LgNwcxaXQ3+NT95f1SJYo1ZOUfXMFtQimzSzDmjJM3g=" name="authenticity_token">         </div> ..........   <p>     <input type="submit" value="Update" name="commit" id="photo_submit">   </p> </form>

5

DmitryPush wrote:

Hi, You just cat you following in your view: <%= link_to 'Destroy', photo, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %> and it appear in browser to that: <a onclick="if (confirm('Are you sure?')) { var f = document.createElement('form'); f.style.display = 'none'; this.parentNode.appendChild(f); f.method = 'POST'; f.action = this.href;var m = document.createElement('input'); m.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); m.setAttribute('name', '_method'); m.setAttribute('value', 'delete'); f.appendChild(m);var s = document.createElement('input'); s.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); s.setAttribute('name', 'authenticity_token'); s.setAttribute('value', 'LgNwcxaXQ3+NT95f1SJYo1ZOUfXMFtQimzSzDmjJM3g='); f.appendChild(s);f.submit(); };return false;" href="/photos/ 51">Destroy</a>

as you can see its still post, but it has hidden input that tells your controller about delete.

Ah yes, of course, i had the feeling that rails handled this with a bit of subterfuge but couldn't remember quite how. I actually tried this with a link_to_remote and the generated html was just a call to jQuery.ajax with the delete method, just as i'd done it already, rather than the code you posted up. I wonder if this is an issue with the jrails plugin, which overrides the javascript generated by rails' remote helpers.

I'm actually doing it in javascript (in a jQuery.ajax call) anyway, so lets see if changing the method to post and adding "_method=delete" to the data has the same effect...yes it does. Great, thanks Dmitry!