Rails 3 routing - :delete method on :collection - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I want to create a route to allow deleting all shares. RESTful way would be to use verb DELETE. How can I create a routing that points to:
DELETE /shares
I tried in the routes:
resources :shares do
delete :on => :collection
end
But this yielded an error that rails can't turn nil into a symbol.
For now I have:
resources :shares do
delete 'delete_all', :on => :collection
end
EDIT: I had a typo in controller action name and this latter way works, but produces URL /shares/delete_all which is not very RESTful.
How can I drop the _delete_all_ part?

Answer 1

For Rails 3 you can do it this way and have nice resourceful GET/DELETE collection actions pointing to index and delete_all respectively:
resources :shares do
delete :index, on: :collection, action: :delete_all
end
If you're using Rails 4 you can make use of concerns to DRY this up and apply it to many resources:
concern :deleteallable do
delete :index, on: :collection, action: :delete_all
end
resources :shares, concerns: :deleteallable
resources :widgets, concerns: :deleteallable

Answer 2

What am I missing?
match 'shares', :to => 'shares#delete_all', :via => :delete
more info: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/the-lowdown-on-routes-in-rails-3/
<subjective opinion>
This is generally a bad idea and a code/design smell. The need to be deleting all records via a RESTful interface should really be behind a protected (authenticated) action and/or the action should be scoped to the user somehow.

Answer 3

The right way for your case, in routes:
resources :shares, except: :destroy
resource :share, only: :destroy
Please, pay attention, that I wrote word resource for destroy action
Then redefine "destroy" in shares_controller:
def destroy
respond_to do |format|
if Share.destroy_all
format.html { redirect_to root_path, notice: 'Share collection successfully deleted' }
else
format.html { redirect_to root_path, notice: 'Share collection cannot be deleted.' }
end
end
end

Answer 4

Here is the non REST way of doing it:
resources :shares do
collection do
delete :destroy_all
end
end
Then in your controller you will need something like this:
def destroy_all
Share.delete_all
end
Then this is what you want to do:
resources :shares do
collection do
delete :index
end
end
Then in your controller you will need something like this:
def index
if request.method == delete #delete might need to be a string here, I don't know
Share.delete_all
else
#shares = Share.all
end
end

Answer 5

There's a slightly simpler syntax for this that works in Rails 4.2 at least:
resources :shares do
delete on: :collection, action: :destroy_all
end

Answer 6

resources :shares do
collection do
delete '/', :to => :delete_all
end
end