REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 5 - DELETE

In the fifth part of the series (which is also the last one, at least for now) we will take a look at the DELETE part.

DELETE, as its name suggests, is for deleting items and it is done by ID which means you don't need to send the entire object to the server via REST.

Operation	REST method	Sample URI
Return item(s)	GET	/books (all books) /books/ (all books) /books/12 (one book with ID = 12)
Create a new item	POST	(you pass the ID in the object itself) /books /books/
Update an item	PUT	(you pass the ID in the object itself) /books /books/
Delete an item	DELETE	/books/12 (book with ID = 12)

The Spring MVC controller part

@RequestMapping(value = "/{id}", method = RequestMethod.DELETE)
    public void handleBookDelete(HttpServletResponse response,
            @PathVariable("id") Long bookId) throws IOException {
        BooksBean booksBean = Factory.getBooksBean();
        try {
            booksBean.deleteBook(bookId);
        } catch (BookNotFoundException e) {
            response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_FOUND);
        }
    }

This is a delete action - the RequestMapping method is DELETE, as you can see. When the book does not exist - we throw a 404, like we did in the previous example.

The Dojo part

function deleteBook(bookId) {
    var deferred = _request("xhrDelete", {
        url: "http://localhost:8080/restsample-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/rest/books/" +
            bookId + ".json",
        handleAs: "json"
    });
    deferred.addCallback(this, function(value) {
        alert("Book deleted.");
    });
    deferred.addErrback(this, function(value) {                
          alert("Error while deleting book: "  + value);
    });
}

This is Dojo code - simple JavaScript very similar to what we did before. It uses the xhrDelete method, that's it.

Conclusion

This is the end of the series, for now. What else is there to possibly improve or cover?

• Error handling - something more automatic then writing to response with sendError.
• Validation - still an open bug at Spring JIRA.
• Your ideas?

I hope the information here will be helpful to someone!

Links

Download source code for this article

1. REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 1 - GET
2. REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 2 - GET from Dojo perspective
3. REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 3 - POST and JSR-303 validation
4. REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 4 - PUT (updating objects)
5. REST with Spring 3.0, Spring MVC and Dojo. Part 5 - DELETE