Deleting Pages

[MUSIC] 0:00 Our users can create pages, read pages, update pages, what's left? 0:04 Right, deleting pages. 0:10 For every resource you create, 0:11 there may come a time when you don't want it anymore. 0:13 You might not want prospective employers to see that page where you show off your 0:15 collection of giant robot toys. 0:19 So let's allow our users to delete pages. 0:21 Just as a browser is supposed to send get requests to get data from the server and 0:25 post requests to post new data on the server, 0:29 a browser sends delete requests to delete data. 0:31 Actually, as with Patch requests, 0:34 it's technically still a POST request coming from the browser, but 0:36 it has amount of parameters that indicate it should be treated as a delete 0:39 request and Rails converts to request type to delete internally. 0:42 Because it's a different request type, 0:46 that means we're going to need a different route. 0:47 Let's set one up in our routes.rb file here. 0:49 As with the post and patch routes, 0:52 there's no need to worry about priority order since there's no chance of 0:54 a delete request getting confused with GET requests no matter what its path is. 0:57 So we'll put the new route here at the bottom. 1:01 Since we're routing delete requests, we'll call the delete method. 1:03 As with all our other page routes, the path should start with /pages. 1:07 And as with the show edit and update routes, 1:14 we'll need a model ID to look up which record we're working with. 1:16 So we'll add an ID URL parameter /:id. 1:19 We'll route these delete requests to the page's controller's destroy method. 1:25 to: pages#destroy. 1:30 Of course, 1:36 the destroy action method doesn't exist on the page's controller yet. 1:36 Let's add it now. 1:40 Action methods on the controller have to be public. 1:41 So be sure the method definition goes above the private keyword or 1:44 Rails won't be able to call it. 1:47 So we'll define a destroy method. 1:52 We'll look up the page to destroy it using the id parameter from the URL, 1:56 just like we do for the show method, the create method, etc. 2:00 We'll assign it to an instance variable named page, and 2:03 we'll call the Page.find method and we need to pass it the ID of 2:07 the page object it should look up, which we're getting from the params[:id]. 2:12 Model objects have a destroy method you can call to delete 2:19 that record from the database. 2:21 So, we simply call page.destroy. 2:23 Now we need a way to send the delete request. 2:28 We'll add a delete link to the show view for an individual page. 2:30 So we'll edit at views > pages > show.html.erb. 2:33 At the bottom, we'll embed some output right after the edit link. 2:39 Within that tag, we'll call link to and we'll set the link text to delete. 2:45 Then we'll pass it our page object. 2:51 The object's ID will be used in the path for the generated link. 2:53 Let's try this delete link out. 2:57 We'll load the show view for one of the pages we want to get rid of. 2:59 We can look at the generated HTML for the link in our browser's developer tools. 3:03 There it is, a link to pages followed by the ID of the page object. 3:09 Now let's close the developer tools and click the link. 3:13 It seems like nothing's happening. 3:19 Let's go to our terminal and check the Rails log to see what's going on. 3:20 We seen started GET /pages/6 over and over. 3:24 It looks like our link is being handled as a GET request, not a delete request. 3:31 And because a GET request with this path gets routed to the show action, 3:35 it's just taking us back to the same page again. 3:39 Our link is taking us to the same page we're already on. 3:42 We can fix this by changing the type of HTTP request that the link sends. 3:45 We'll just add a method keyword argument to link to with 3:50 the request type that we want to send as a value. 3:55 In this case, we want to send a delete request, so we'll use the symbol delete. 3:58 Note that the method argument name here doesn't refer to the method on 4:03 the controller. 4:06 That's named destroy, not delete. 4:07 This is the HTTP request method such as Get post or delete. 4:09 Let's save this, refresh our browser and try clicking the delete link again. 4:14 It looks like nothing's happening still, but if we look at the log in our terminal, 4:19 you'll see that Rails processed it as a DELETE request. 4:24 We can also see that it loaded the requested page and then deleted it. 4:27 We can confirm this if we go back to the index of all pages. 4:33 The page we were on is gone, as it should be. 4:36 Now we just need to update the page's controller to handle things a little more 4:39 gracefully when we click that link. 4:42 As with the create an update methods, we're going to send the browser a redirect 4:44 response so that it loads a different path. 4:47 In our delete method, right after we destroy the page objects, 4:50 we'll call redirect_to. 4:53 And we'll send it to the /pages path by calling the pages_path method. 4:57 Save that, and now when we visit a page and click the Delete link, we'll be 5:03 redirected back to the list of all pages and that page will be gone from the list. 5:08 You can now create, read, update and 5:13 delete instances of your page model, all from your browser. 5:15 You have a complete Rails resource. 5:18 Before we wrap up the course, though, 5:20 there's a couple more things we can do to make the code cleaner. 5:22 The first will let us clean up our routes.rb file quite a bit, and 5:25 we'll be showing you that next. 5:28