 <p>The Delete request isn't a full on true delete request. It's actually faked, much like the put request is when you use the form_for on a saved object. As far as I know, there's no reason why not use the REST convention provided. </p> <p>On another note, is that your own code in the snippet, or an example? Kind of curious why you would check to see if the record you are deleting is associated to parent. I guess there's always the possibility that in between the time you clicked on the delete, and it got to the request, that someone changed its parent somewhere else.</p> <p>Edit, here's the header information when i click on the delete link in a rails 3 scaffold app:</p> <pre><code>Request URL:http://phone_qa.dev/sites/2 Request Method:POST Status Code:302 Moved Temporarily Request Headersview source Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8 Cache-Control:max-age=0 Connection:keep-alive Content-Length:86 Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded Cookie: _phone_qa_session=BAh7B0kiD3Nlc3Npb25faWQGOgZFRkkiJTg4Y2Q4ZTgyOGYwM2IyMWI1N2Y4MjYyMTcwMzJiMzMwBjsAVEkiEF9jc3JmX3Rva2VuBjsARkkiMVY0QkFIOXdzRFZXZi9yYnlkODJCUEdLTisvT2V6dVpkVDYyckkyR3JQSzg9BjsARg%3D%3D--e8244fd59e5fc34b37a93c2e768ace7a3bfffe44 Host:phone_qa.dev Origin:http://phone_qa.dev Referer:http://phone_qa.dev/sites User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.107 Safari/535.1 Form Dataview URL encoded _method:delete authenticity_token:V4BAH9wsDVWf/rbyd82BPGKN /OezuZdT62rI2GrPK8= </code></pre> <p>You can see how it's actually a post request, but under the form data, there's a variable called _method with the value delete.</p>