API Design Patterns

19 Criteria-based deletion

This chapter covers

• How the custom purge method can be used to delete matching resources
• Why the custom purge method is dangerous and should be avoided if possible
• A variety of safety precautions to avoid accidentally deleting more data than intended
• How to address concerns about consistency in the matching result set

While the batch operations we learned about in chapter 18 provide the ability to delete several resources with a single API call, there’s an underlying requirement that we must know in advance: the unique identifiers of the resource we want to delete. However, there are many scenarios where we’re not so much interested in deleting a specific list of resources but instead are more interested in deleting ...