Restful Collections - how to either remove OR delete items

Question

I read quite some stuff about RESTful API Design. But when it comes to the implementation, it wasn't that easy anymore. I got stuck at the following problem:

Assume the following 2 endpoint:

1. /api/v1/users/:id
2. /api/v1/users/1/friends/:id

As we all can see, friends is a collection of the resource user. A user can have n-friends in his friendslist (by standard this would be many to many, but for now, let's assume this to be one to many). Okay, now i want to REMOVE a user (id=3) from the friendslist of user 1 by doing the following HTTP-Request:

DELETE api/v1/users/1/friends/3

And this is where i got stuck - either the request deletes the whole user resource which has id = 3 or removes the resource from the collection. Because both would be valid Restful implementations i think.

So the question is: How to remove an item from the collection without deleting the original resource

I hope that this question is no duplicate - but i did google a lot to find the answer. Maybe i don't know the related technical term to find some pleasing results...

Thanks in forward.

Answer 1

The approach to REST looks fine but that really only speaks to path format and HTTP verb. The problem must be in your application code or app routes.