Question

I have an existing REST application on my server.
For example, if you send a request with the DELETE method to “/users/3” it will delete the user whose id is 3.

But now I would like to create an HTML “client” for this application. For example there is an HTML form, and when you submit it the user is deleted.
Unfortunately you can’t write <form method="delete" action"/users/3"> because only GET and POST are supported by forms. And even if you could, I would like the user to be redirected to a “the operation successed” or a “there was an error” page afterwards, which would not be possible.

I considered using AJAX, but I need to support the [insert injurous comment here] people who deactivated Javascript

I could modify the application so I can send POST requests with method=DELETE&redirect=/successpage&redirectfail=/failpage but that would take a lot of time.

Is there a way to send the POST request to a PHP page, which would in turn translate it to the real request, then would interpret the status code returned by my app, and do the appropriate redirection?

Thank you

EDIT: I’m not using any framework for the app. This was a very simple app at the beginning, and it became more complex over time

Answer 1

This can be done using a CURL request to your REST API:

See the CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST option:

A custom request method to use instead of “GET” or “HEAD” when doing a
HTTP request. This is useful for doing “DELETE” or other, more obscure
HTTP requests. Valid values are things like “GET”, “POST”, “CONNECT”
and so on; i.e. Do not enter a whole HTTP request line here. For
instance, entering “GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n” would be
incorrect.

For example:

$ch = curl_init('http://localhost/upload.php');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'DELETE');    
curl_exec($ch);

So this would be actioned in the target file of the form after the form has been POSTed onto it.