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LESSON 72 OF 188 · BACKEND: APIS WITH A DATABASE

Delete a Product (DELETE) in Python

Practice

The shop stops selling the Gift card. To remove a product, a client sends a DELETE to the product's own path, /products/8: the third method on that path, after GET and PUT. It needs no body: the id in the path says it all.

Here is a DELETE on another table, a list of newsletter subscribers:

cursor = db.execute("DELETE FROM subscribers WHERE id = ?", (3,))
db.commit()
print(cursor.rowcount)   # 1 if subscriber 3 was there, 0 if not

The WHERE matters even more than in an UPDATE: DELETE FROM products alone empties the whole table. Deleting an id that isn't there is no error, it just removes nothing, so cursor.rowcount is 0 and you answer 404. When a product is removed, you answer 204 No Content with an empty body: it worked, and there is nothing to send back.

Starting from the shop's 8 products, your code must answer, in this order:

DELETE /products/8  →  204  (empty body)
GET /products/8  →  404  {"error": "Product not found"}
DELETE /products/8  →  404  {"error": "Product not found"}
DELETE /products/99  →  404  {"error": "Product not found"}

Your task: add the route DELETE /products/<int:product_id>. Delete that product with a ? placeholder and commit. Answer 404 if no row was removed, and otherwise an empty body with the status 204.


Assignment
Follow the Coding Tutorial to add the delete_product route, which removes a product from the database.


Hint
Pass the id as (product_id,): the comma makes it a tuple. For the 204, return an empty string "" and the status, the way add_product returns a body and 201.


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    Db Delete in Python

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