Restful way for deleting a bunch of items

Question

In wiki article for REST it is indicated that if you use http://example.com/resources DELETE, that means you are deleting the entire collection.

If you use http://example.com/resources/7HOU57Y DELETE, that means you are deleting that element.

I am doing a WEBSITE, note NOT WEB SERVICE.

I have a list that has 1 checkbox for each item on the list. Once i select multiple items for deletion, i will allow users to press a button called DELETE SELECTION. If user presses the button, a js dialog box will popup asking user to confirm the deletion. if user confirms, all the items are deleted.

So how should i cater for deleting multiple items in a RESTFUL way?

NOTE, currently for DELETE in a webpage, what i do is i use FORM tag with POST as action but include a _method with the value DELETE since this is what was indicated by others in SO on how to do RESTful delete for webpage.

Answer 1

I think rojoca's answer is the best so far. A slight variation might be, to do away with the javascript confirm on the same page, and instead, create the selection and redirect to it, showing a confirm message on that page. In other words:

From:
http://example.com/resources/

do a

POST with a selection of the ID's to:
http://example.com/resources/selections

which, if successful, should respond with:

HTTP/1.1 201 created, and a Location header to:
http://example.com/resources/selections/DF4XY7

On this page you will then see a (javascript) confirm box, which if you confirm will do a request of:

DELETE http://example.com/resources/selections/DF4XY7

which, if successful, should respond with: HTTP/1.1 200 Ok (or whatever is appropriate for a successful delete)

Answer 2

One option is to create a delete "transaction". So you POST to something like http://example.com/resources/deletes a new resource consisting of a list of resources to be deleted. Then in your application you just do the delete. When you do the post you should return a location of your created transaction e.g., http://example.com/resources/deletes/DF4XY7. A GET on this could return the status of the transaction (complete or in progress) and/or a list of resources to be deleted.