Hoot Back-End Delete Hoot

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able build a route that removes a single hoot from the database by id.

Overview

In this section, we will create a new route to delete a single hoot. This route will be a DELETE request to /hoots/<hoot_id>, returning a JSON response with the deleted hoot.

We will be following these specs when building the route:

• CRUD Action: DELETE
• Method: DELETE
• Path: /hoots/<hoot_id>
• Response: JSON
• Success Status Code: 200 Ok
• Success Response Body: A JSON object with the deleted hoot.
• Error Status Code: 500 Internal Server Error
• Error Response Body: A JSON object with an error key and a message describing the error.

Define the route

Our route will listen for DELETE requests on /hoots/<hoot_id>:

DELETE /hoots/<hoot_id>

We’ll make use of our @token_required decorator, as only a logged in user should be able to delete a hoot.

Add the following:

@hoots_blueprint.route('/hoots/<hoot_id>', methods=['DELETE'])
@token_required

🏆 Any route that requires auth should include the @token_required decorator. These are our protected routes.

Code the controller function

Let’s breakdown what we’ll accomplish inside our controller function.

Our function will use the connection cursor to execute the following SQL query:

DELETE FROM hoots WHERE hoots.id = %s"

This should resemble our update route, since we’ll need to check for ownership before allowing a user to delete a hoot.

Add the following to hoots_blueprint.py:

@hoots_blueprint.route('/hoots/<hoot_id>', methods=['DELETE'])
@token_required
def delete_hoot(hoot_id):
    try:
        connection = get_db_connection()
        cursor = connection.cursor(cursor_factory=psycopg2.extras.RealDictCursor)
        cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM hoots WHERE hoots.id = %s", (hoot_id,))
        hoot_to_update = cursor.fetchone()
        if hoot_to_update is None:
            return jsonify({"error": "hoot not found"}), 404
        connection.commit()
        if hoot_to_update["author"] is not g.user["id"]:
            return jsonify({"error": "Unauthorized"}), 401
        cursor.execute("DELETE FROM hoots WHERE hoots.id = %s", (hoot_id,))
        connection.commit()
        connection.close()
        return jsonify({"message": "hoot deleted successfully"}), 200
    except Exception as error:
        return jsonify({"error": str(error)}), 500

Test the route in Postman

Now that we have the route let’s test it with Postman.

We’ll do this by sending a DELETE request to the following URL:

http://127.0.0.1:5000/hoots/2

💡 Be sure to update this with a hoot id value that exists in your database!

If the request is successful, you should see a response like the following:

{
  "message": "hoot deleted successfully"
}