How to send enclose data in DELETE request in Jersey client?

I have the following server-side code in Jersey 2.x:

@Path("/store/remove/from/group")
@DELETE
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED)
@Produces(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN)
public Response removeStoresFromGroup(@FormParam("storeName") List<String> storeNames, @FormParam("groupName") String groupName) {
    //......
}

On client side, I want to use Jersey 2.x client to send a delete request to the above web service. However, from the documentation of Jersey client API, I didn’t find how to enclose the following data in DELETE request:

WebTarget webTarget = client.target("/store/remove/from/group");
MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedHashMap<String, String>();
List<String> storeName = new ArrayList<String>();
storeName.add("Store1");
storeName.add("Store2");
storeName.add("Store3");

formData.addAll("storeName", storeName);
formData.add("groupName", "Group A");

Response response = webTarget.request().accept(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN).delete();   //The delete() method doesn't take any entity body in the request.

From the Jersey client API, the SyncInvoker class doesn’t support a delete method with entity body as its argument. So I can only use either POST or PUT to send the data to the server like the following (but not for DELETE):

Response response = webTarget.request().accept(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN).post(Entity.form(formData)); 

But I want to use DELETE request since the request is deleting some resources. How to send DELETE request with some entity data via Jersey client?

Answer

A DELETE with an entity body is not strictly forbidden but it’s very uncommon and ignored by some frameworks/servers. The need of an entity body may indicate that a DELETE is not used as it is intended.

For instance: If a GET /customers/4711 returns one customer and you send a DELETE /customers/4711 the next GET on this resource should return a 404. You deleted a resource identified by a URL like defined in the spec.

Your URL /store/remove/from/group does not seem to identify a resource. Using identifiers like /store/4711 or /groups/4711 and sending a DELETE on them would not fit your needs because you want to “remove a store from a group” not delete a store or a group.

Assuming you have a group resource

{
  "id" : 4711,
  "stores" : [123, 456, 789]
}

and you want a result like

{
  "id" : 4711,
  "stores" : [123, 789]
}

you are not deleting anything. You are modifying a resource so PUT, POST or PATCH are appropiate methods. JSON-Patch is a good format for describing such changes. A request would look like this:

PATCH /groups/4711 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json-patch

[
  {
    "op" : "remove"
    "path" : "stores/1"
  }
]