Delete Parent and Children via the frontend

Question

I'm having some trouble solving this issue and could do it with some help. Basically, I'm looking to replicate the "Delete (with descendants)" function from the admin panel in a front-end form.

On the front-end at the moment users can delete children or parent pages, but not the parent (and children automatically). I've tried a number of different methods but to no avail.

My front-end is using...

       <form method="post" accept-charset="UTF-8" id="delete-page">
          {{ csrfInput() }}
          {{ hiddenInput('context', 'index') }}
          {{ hiddenInput('criteria', '') }}
          {{ hiddenInput('elementAction', 'craft\\elements\\actions\\Delete') }}
          {{ hiddenInput('elementIds', entry.id) }}
          {{ hiddenInput('elementType', 'craft\\elements\\Entry') }}
          {{ hiddenInput('hard', false) }}
          {{ hiddenInput('source', "section:#{entry.section.uid}") }}
          {{ hiddenInput('withDescendants', true) }}
          <input type="submit" class="button" class="save" value="Delete P+C" accesskey="v">
      </form>

In the Craft Docs, I came across withDescendants but not sure how to utilize this on the front-end.

Any advice here?

Answer 1

Many of those advanced endpoints are undocumented, but you can find out a lot with the devtools. If you use the Delete (with Descendants) option in the backend and check the devtools, you can see it uses craft\controllers\ElementIndexesController::actionPerformAction. This method expects an elementAction parameter to tell it which action to perform. You can pass craft\\elements\\actions\\Delete which includes the withDescendants option you're looking for. The payload for the request will also tell you which parameters the action requires:

Check the source code of the actionPerformAction method and the craft\elements\actions\Delete class to find which parameters you can use and which formats they can take. Then you can construct a frontend form with (hidden) inputs to perform this action for a particular element.

Adding the parameters inside a form (with method="POST") can be done using the hiddenInput Twig function:

{{ hiddenInput('elementAction', 'craft\\elements\\actions\\Delete') }}
{{ hiddenInput('elementType', 'craft\\elements\\Entry' }}
{{ hiddenInput('source', "section:#{entry.section.uid}" }}
{{ hiddenInput('withDescendants', true) }}

Check the request in the devtools as mentioned above as well as the source code for the controller endpoint and the action class to find out which parameters are required. For this action in particular, it looks like it requires criteria for the query, and an array of elementIds to delete. Some parameters may also be optional. Make sure to check the source code for dependencies between parameters as well. For example, it looks like the action will not delete any descendants if you specify hard: true to hard-delete the elements instead of soft-deleting them.