HTTP Method Spoofing

When working with HTML forms you can only use GET or POST HTTP verbs. In most cases, this is just fine. However, to support REST-ful routing you need to support other, more correct, verbs, like DELETE or PUT. Since the browsers don’t support this, CodeIgniter provides you with a way to spoof the method that is being used. This allows you to make a POST request, but tell the application that it should be treated as a different request type.

To spoof the method, a hidden input is added to the form with the name of _method. It’s value is the HTTP verb that you want the request to be:

<form action="" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="PUT" />
</form>

This form is converted into a PUT request and is a true PUT request as far as the routing and the IncomingRequest class are concerned.

The form that you are using must be a POST request. GET requests cannot be spoofed.