Question

Consider the following PUT requests that build a CouchDB Database and add a document

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/mydb

Response: {“ok”:true}

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/mydb/mydoc -d '{"name":"John", "email":"[e-mail]"}'

Response: {“ok”:true,”id”:”mydoc”,”rev”:”1-8c497db1c5b38cb65981a2c83b349d83″}

Ok, we’ve got a document. Now I want to delete this document. I try:

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:5984/mydb/mydoc -d '{"_rev":"1-8c497db1c5b38cb65981a2c83b349d83}'

Response: {“error”:”conflict”,”reason”:”Document update conflict.”}

Hmm. I don’t see why that doesn’t work, so I try this:

curl -X DELETE http://localhost:5984/mydb/mydoc?rev=1-8c497db1c5b38cb65981a2c83b349d83

Response: {“ok”:true,”id”:”mydoc”,”rev”:”2-e8b8b0632384aae62338c57e1826ea81″}

That works…but why? What’s wrong with the first? Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

DELETE requests shares GET semantics and message body is ignored, so you need to use query parameters to pass revision token with request.