Is REST DELETE really idempotent?

by

Idempotence refers to the state of the system after the request has completed

In all cases (apart from the error issues – see below), the account no longer exists.

From here

“Methods can also have the property of
“idempotence” in that (aside from
error or expiration issues) the
side-effects of N > 0 identical
requests is the same as for a single
request. The methods GET, HEAD, PUT
and DELETE share this property. Also,
the methods OPTIONS and TRACE SHOULD
NOT have side effects, and so are
inherently idempotent. “

The key bit there is the side-effects of N > 0 identical requests is the same as for a single request.

You would be correct to expect that the status code would be different but this does not affect the core concept of idempotency – you can send the request more than once without additional changes to the state of the server.

More Related Contents:

  1. Detecting the character encoding of an HTTP POST request
  2. Content-Length header with HEAD requests?
  3. What is the difference between POST and PUT in HTTP?
  4. Is an entity body allowed for an HTTP DELETE request?
  5. Are HTTP headers case-sensitive?
  6. Custom HTTP headers : naming conventions
  7. What’s the difference between Cache-Control: max-age=0 and no-cache?
  8. Difference between Pragma and Cache-Control headers?
  9. What are all the possible values for HTTP “Content-Type” header?
  10. Ideal HTTP cache control headers for different types of resources
  11. Remove http referer
  12. Proper REST response for empty table?
  13. Which HTTP methods match up to which CRUD methods?
  14. Why is Cache-Control attribute sent in request header (client to server)?
  15. How to forward headers on HTTP redirect
  16. HTTP status code for a partial successful request
  17. What is the difference between HTTP and REST?
  18. What is q=0.5 in Accept* HTTP headers?
  19. Standard for adding multiple values of a single HTTP Header to a request or response
  20. What is a full specification of X-Forwarded-Proto HTTP header?
  21. Setting HTTP headers
  22. Payloads of HTTP Request Methods
  23. What HTTP response headers are required
  24. what characters are allowed in HTTP header values?
  25. What does HTTP/1.1 302 mean exactly?
  26. HTTP Cache Control max-age, must-revalidate
  27. Should I use PATCH or PUT in my REST API?
  28. Get “Content-Type” header of request in PHP
  29. What is the proper HTTP response to send for requests that require SSL/TLS
  30. Avoid caching of the http responses

Leave a Comment