Sending DELETE request in a link in nodejs express app

Question

Sending DELETE request in a link in nodejs express app

I have a route which accepts DELETE requests, and I know that with Express you can add

 <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="delete" />

to a form that sends a POST request to the url.

However, how would you do this with a link instead of a form?

javascript
http
node.js
rest
express

Answer 1

This is not supported for GET requests:

methodOverride() only checks req.body (POST arguments) and request headers - neither can be set for a regular link (you can however set custom headers in AJAX requests even if they use GET).

This make senses since otherwise it could be a major issue even when using CSRF tokens. You can never know when a browser will decide to prefetch a link - so GET requests should never perform actions such as deleting things.

If you really need it and do not care about the drawbacks, consider writing a custom function:

function methodOverrideGET(key) {
    key = key || "_method";
    return function methodOverrideGET(req, res, next) {
        if (req.originalMethod != req.method) {
            // already overridden => do not override again
            next();
            return;
        }

        req.originalMethod = req.method;
        if (req.query && key in req.query) {
            req.method = req.query[key].toUpperCase();
            delete req.query[key];
        }
        next();
    };
};

Now you can .use(methodOverrideGET) after .use(methodOverride) and then simply add _method=DELETE to the query string.