Using the DELETE HTTP Method

In the previous lesson, we used /users/<id>/delete as the URL to POST to.

We will show an alternative implementation in this section that does the more restful thing of issuing a DELETE on /users/<id>.

Turning POST into DELETE

As browsers only allow GET and POST, we need support from Spring Boot to turn the POST from the browser into a DELETE. This support comes in the form of the HiddenHttpMethodFilter class and can easily be enabled by setting the spring.mvc.hiddenmethod.filter.enabled property in the application.properties file:

spring.mvc.hiddenmethod.filter.enabled=true

We can update UserController to map our doDeleteMethod on the DELETE HTTP method: