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Custom HTTP methods

By Peter Ward filed in Utilities

When you design the API for your website, it often makes sense to use things like the DELETE method to delete resources. Unfortunately, the HTML specification only allows GET and POST for form methods.

With this snippet, you can write your forms like this:

<form action="{{ url_for('delete_entry', id=10) }}" method="POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="DELETE" />
    <input type="submit" value="Delete entry 10" />
</form>

And use it in your view like this:

@app.route('/entries/<int:id>', methods=['GET'])
def get_entry(id):
    ...

@app.route('/entries/<int:id>', methods=['POST'])
def update_entry(id):
    ...

@app.route('/entries/<int:id>', methods=['DELETE'])
def delete_entry(id):
    ...

The magic snippet to get this working is this:

@app.before_request
def before_request():
    method = request.form.get('_method', '').upper()
    if method:
        request.environ['REQUEST_METHOD'] = method
        ctx = flask._request_ctx_stack.top
        ctx.url_adapter.default_method = method
        assert request.method == method

Please note that this uses non-public parts of Flask's API, and hence could easily break in future versions (tested against development version of 0.2).

(suggestions for improvement welcome!)

This snippet by Peter Ward can be used freely for anything you like. Consider it public domain.

© Copyright 2010 by Armin Ronacher // sign in