How to create a delete form with RESTful routes in Rails.

Question

I am trying to create a form that serves as confirmation for the destroy method on a controller. In my routes I have:

resources :leagues do
  get 'delete', :on => :member
end

In my delete.html.erb, I have the following for:

<% form_for current_league, :html => {:method => :delete} do |form| %>
  <%= form.submit 'Yes' %>
  <%= form.submit 'No', :name => 'cancel' %>
<% end %>

current_league is a helper function defined by:

def current_league
  @current_league ||= League.find_by_id(params[:id])
end

So the problem is that the form that is generated only edits the league model, as seen by the form method="post".

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/leagues/1" class="edit_league" id="edit_league_1" method="post">
  <div style="margin:0;padding:0;display:inline"><input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="&#x2713;" />
    <input name="_method" type="hidden" value="delete" />
    <input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="abcdefg" />
  </div>  
  <input id="league_submit" name="commit" type="submit" value="Yes" /> 
  <input id="league_submit" name="cancel" type="submit" value="No" /> 
</form> 

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

I think that will already work. As in rails guide http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html#how-do-forms-with-patch-put-or-delete-methods-work-questionmark

However, most browsers don’t support methods other than “GET” and “POST” when it comes to submitting forms.

Rails works`around this issue by emulating other methods over POST with a hidden input named "_method", which is set to reflect the desired method:

as you see in the output form there is

<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/leagues/1" class="edit_league" id="edit_league_1" method="post">
    ....
    <input name="_method" type="hidden" value="delete" />
    ....
</form>

When reading this variable, rails understood that this is a DELETE method, not a POST method. even though the form it self is a POST.