Question

I know it goes against the REST architecture but, from a pragmatic viewpoint, what is wrong about using GET request method to remove data from a database?

Let’s say I built an application that has an administration panel. In administration panel admins can remove items by accessing URIs like these:

/admin-panel/items-controller/remove-action/id/X

Where X is a primary key of an item to be deleted.

Are there any practical disadvantages to using this approach? Please educate me because I don’t understand why POST should be used for this.

My main problem with using POST for removing data is that instead of a simple link (easy to style in CSS) you have to print a form with POST method next to each item and then style it to look like a button/link. Or am I completely misunderstanding?

Answer 1

Three words: search engine spiders.

Or Browser plugins that prefetch links to speed up browsing. All kinds of software implicitly assumes that a GET request can be made freely without negative effects. It’s not just REST, the HTTP standard itself (RFC 2616) says so:

In particular, the convention has been
established that the GET and HEAD
methods SHOULD NOT have the
significance of taking an action other
than retrieval. These methods ought to
be considered “safe”. This allows user
agents to represent other methods,
such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a
special way, so that the user is made
aware of the fact that a possibly
unsafe action is being requested.