RESTful form prior to deleting a record

Question

We have a Rails app where we frequently have interstitial pages before deleting a record. Maybe a simple confirmation that details the consequences of deleting a record, or in other cases we need additional information. For example, when a user is deleted we may need the current user to select where to transfer associated records. It's not clear to me, however, what is the RESTful convention for retrieving the page/form needed to delete a record.

In Rails parlance, we have a GET request to new to retrieve the form to then POST and create a new record. There's a GET request to edit to retrieve the form to then PATCH update a record, but there isn't a corresponding action to GET the form to DELETE a record. Is there a RESTful convention for this sort of thing?

In adherence with the 7 RESTful actions given in Rails, we might create a new UserDeletionsController with new and create actions, but that feels pretty clunky, and kind of misaligned in that we're deleting a record via a POST to create. We're considering adding an 8th acceptable action, something like a GET request to /users/5/delete which retrieves the form. The form would then submit a DELETE request to /users/5. What other alternatives are there?

Answer 1

I think the main problem that people confuse REST APIs with webapplications. REST is mostly for machine to machine communication in a (semi) standardized way. It is possible to use a REST API from a browser with a javascript based REST client. Without javascript the browser is the worst possible REST client and that's why we had URLs containing methods like /new and /delete. As of the question the GET /users/5 should return a hyperlink with an URI template something like UserDeletionOperation DELETE /users/5?details={additionalInfo} and your API documentation should contain what you expect for additionalInfo in the case of UserDeletionOperation. You can make the documentation public with something like GET /docs/UserDeletionOperation/additionalInfo Ofc. you can have many different parameters for that operation, so this is just a basic example. Or if there is a standard solution for the operation e.g. schema.org, then better to use that one. For a (semi) general REST client it is even funnier if you use RDF and the hydra vocab to describe your API documentation and resources.