Delete Entity (Azure Storage)

Article
06/27/2023

The Delete Entity operation deletes an existing entity in a table.

Request

You can construct the Delete Entity request as follows. HTTPS is recommended. Replace myaccount with the name of your storage account, mytable with the name of your table, and myPartitionKey and myRowKey with the name of the partition key and row key identifying the entity to be deleted.

Method	Request URI	HTTP version
`DELETE`	`https://myaccount.table.core.windows.net/mytable(PartitionKey='myPartitionKey', RowKey='myRowKey')`	HTTP/1.1

The address of the entity to be updated might take a number of forms on the request URI. For additional details, see the OData Protocol.

Emulated storage service URI

When you make a request against the emulated storage service, specify the emulator hostname and Azure Table Storage port as 127.0.0.1:10002, followed by the emulated storage account name.

Method	Request URI	HTTP version
`DELETE`	`http://127.0.0.1:10002/devstoreaccount1/myentity(PartitionKey='myPartitionKey', RowKey='myRowKey')`	HTTP/1.1

Table Storage in the storage emulator differs from the Azure service in several ways. For more information, see Differences between the storage emulator and Azure Storage services.

URI parameters

You can specify the following additional parameter on the request URI.

Parameter	Description
`timeout`	Optional. The timeout parameter is expressed in seconds. For more information, see Setting timeouts for Table Storage operations.

Request headers

The following table describes required and optional request headers.

Request header	Description
`Authorization`	Required. Specifies the authorization scheme, account name, and signature. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
`Date` or `x-ms-date`	Required. Specifies the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for the request. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
`x-ms-version`	Optional. Specifies the version of the operation to use for this request. For more information, see Versioning for the Azure Storage services.
`If-Match`	Required. The client can specify the `ETag` for the entity on the request, in order to compare to the `ETag` maintained by the service for the purpose of optimistic concurrency. The delete operation proceeds only if the `ETag` sent by the client matches the value maintained by the server. This match indicates that the entity hasn't been modified since it was retrieved by the client. To force an unconditional delete, set `If-Match` to the wildcard character (*).
`x-ms-client-request-id`	Optional. Provides a client-generated, opaque value with a 1-kibibyte (KiB) character limit that's recorded in the logs when logging is configured. We highly recommend that you use this header to correlate client-side activities with requests that the server receives. For more information, see Monitor Azure Table Storage.

Request body

None.

Response

The response includes an HTTP status code and a set of response headers.

Status code

A successful operation returns status code 204 (No Content). For information about status codes, see Status and error codes and Table Storage error codes.

Response headers

The response includes the following headers. The response can also include additional, standard HTTP headers. All standard headers conform to the HTTP/1.1 protocol specification.

Response header	Description
`x-ms-request-id`	This header uniquely identifies the request that was made, and can be used for troubleshooting the request. For more information, see Troubleshooting API operations.
`x-ms-version`	Indicates the version of Table Storage used to run the request. This header is returned for requests made against version 2009-09-19 and later.
`Date`	A UTC date/time value that indicates the time at which the response was initiated. The service generates this value.
`x-ms-client-request-id`	You can use this header to troubleshoot requests and corresponding responses. The value of this header is equal to the value of the `x-ms-client-request-id` header, if it's present in the request. The value is at most 1,024 visible ASCII characters. If the `x-ms-client-request-id` header isn't present in the request, this header won't be present in the response.

Response body

None.

Authorization

The account owner can perform this operation. Additionally, anyone with a shared access signature who has permission to perform this operation can perform it.

Remarks

When you successfully delete an entity, the entity is immediately marked for deletion and is no longer accessible.

An entity's ETag provides default optimistic concurrency for delete operations. The ETag value is opaque, and should not be read or relied upon. Before a delete operation occurs, Table Storage verifies that the entity's current ETag value is identical to the ETag value included with the delete request in the If-Match header. If the values are identical, Table Storage determines that the entity hasn't been modified since it was retrieved, and the delete operation proceeds.

If the entity's ETag differs from that specified with the delete request, the delete operation fails with status code 412 (Precondition Failed). This error indicates that the entity has been changed on the server since it was retrieved. To resolve this error, retrieve the entity again and reissue the request.

To force an unconditional delete operation, set the value of the If-Match header to the wildcard character (*) on the request. Passing this value to the operation overrides the default optimistic concurrency, and ignores any mismatch in ETag values.

If the If-Match header is missing from the request, the service returns status code 400 (Bad Request). A request malformed in other ways can also return code 400. For more information, see Table Storage error codes.

Any application that can authorize and send an HTTP DELETE request can delete an entity. For more information about constructing a query by using HTTP DELETE, see Add, modify, and delete entities.

For information about performing batch delete operations, see Performing entity group transactions.

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