#77 Destroy without JavaScript (revised)

This doesn't seem like a good solution to me. Overwriting the "resources" method in an initializer will confuse the heck out of anyone looking at your code except yourself.
I'd say if you need to support users with JS disabled, use a button (and don't make it look like a link either!)

This means all resources will have a delete action on them.
Isn't that a bad idea?

DELETE /products/1/delete looks rather confusing, I think it is better to use POST verb in this case: POST /products/1/delete. Also, these are perfectly valid RESTful routes, there is nothing wrong with them.

I would also suggest to extend your routing DSL explicitly instead of patching Rails internal classes so that the modification is obvious for you and others. This will also avoid troubles with external engines that will expect default behavior.

# lib/delete_resource_route.rb
module DeleteResourceRoute
  def resources(*args, &block)
    super(*args) do
      yield if block_given?
      member do
        get :delete
        delete :delete, action: :destroy
      end
    end
  end
end

# config/routes.rb
require 'delete_resource_route'

Example::Application.routes.draw do
  extend DeleteResourceRoute
  resources :categories
  resources :products
  root to: 'products#index'
end

Very useful. Thanks, Ryan.

I did have to change a few things before it worked in Rails 3.0 though. I had to remove the html hash in the delete form.

<%= form_tag request.url, method: :delete do %>

And I needed to add a delete method to the application_controller:

  def delete
    render 'application/delete'
  end

After that it worked beautifully.

How would we do to do it remotely ?

like :remote => true

I still maintain that you should be able to delete records in Rails by default when Javascript is not available, I've been banging on about this since 2006:

• http://thelucid.com/2010/03/15/rails-can-we-please-have-a-delete-action-by-default/
• http://thelucid.com/2006/07/26/simply-restful-the-missing-action/

I must get around to implementing it as an Engine. I find it frustrating that you have to include the whole of jQuery on an app that doesn't otherwise require Javascript, just to let users delete records.

p.s. loving the Pro and Revised episodes Ryan!

But if you click a button_to so it opens in a new tab it will load a GET request. Tested in Chrome and Safari.