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views:

26

answers:

1
Q: 

Response code when POST fails to complete

Hi,

I have a scenario where a client Posts to a resource and if the data in the post is not valid then I want to return back a error saying what caused the failure. I am thinking that a 409 with a response body is appropriate? anyone any thoughts or suggestions on a different response?

Cheers,

Chris

+1  A: 
  • 400 means the request as such was not understood (e.g. bad syntax)
  • 409 means request understood but there is a conflict the client might solve (e.g with PATCH)
  • 415 means the submitted media type is not understood by server
  • 422 means the data was syntactically correct but semantically wrong

What do you mean by 'not valid' HTH,

Jan

Jan Algermissen  2010-02-10 11:38:53
Say in the request there is an email address and i validate it before returning a response, if that validation fails i want to return back a message saying that the email address validation has failed accompanied by a suitable response code
Chris Woods  2010-02-10 11:59:07
422 is the closest to your scenario.
Darrel Miller  2010-02-10 12:10:22
Hmmm 422 is a WebDAV standard code and i don't want to use those?
Chris Woods  2010-02-10 13:13:09
It's fine to use 422 it's in the IANA list, it's used by Rails and best of all it's semantically a good fit for what you need.
Chris McCauley  2010-02-10 13:41:26
Here is the IANA list http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes
Darrel Miller  2010-02-11 00:44:44

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