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Nonstandard HTTP Verbs

Let's look at how we delete a post. Currently we have:

<form method="post" action="/posts/<%= post.id %>" style='display: inline'>
  <input type="submit" value="Delete" />
</form>

This issues an HTTP POST. Since we changed to RESTful routes, we need to trigger a DELETE HTTP verb here. However, since browsers natively only support HTTP GET and POST methods, we have to do something a bit tricky to use HTTP POST to fake PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods.

<form method="post" action="/posts/<%= post.id %>" style='display: inline'>
  <input name= "_method" type="hidden" value="delete">
  <input type="submit" value="Delete" />
</form>

On the server side, Rails is able to examine the "_method" value in the params to restore the semantics of the HTTP request.

Take a look at your server log to make sure Rails interprets this as an HTTP DELETE and also use a debugger to see it's routed to the destroy action of the PostsController.

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