Re: [Connotea-code-devel] webapi: 404 on empty query

[Lund, B. <b....@na...>]

Hi Robert,

On 25/5/06 21:12, "Robert Forkel" <xro...@go...> wrote:
> hi,
> while testing my api wrapper, i ran into a problem with the webapi:
> queries for tags/posts/bookmarks return 404 if no matches have been
> found. to cater for this, the wrapper tried to parse a webapi response
> for this http status code. for some requests - e.g. for non-existing
> users like http://www.connotea.org/data/bookmarks/user/http
> - only the apache default 404 page is returned, which can't be parsed
> as webapi response.

Hmm, thanks. That's definitely a bug.  A response XML document should
definitely be returned, whatever the appropriate status code.  It looks like
it only happens when there's a user in the request (see, for example,
http://www.connotea.org/data/tag/gfdgffdgfdgfdfgd for what it should look
like).

We'll fix that.

> so i'd propose to return 200 with a webapi
> response saying "no items found" for empty searches, or simply empty
> result xml?
> what do you think?

Looking through the HTTP spec, the following codes are likely candidates:

200 OK - with an empty XML document
204 No content - with no body at all
400 Bad request - indicates that the tag or username in invalid
404 Not found - indicates that the tag or user is unknown

Looking through these, 400 seems too harsh -- the request was valid syntax,
just resulting in no items.  204 looks good, but we wouldn't be to put a
Response body, nor explain exactly why there is no content.

I'm not sure about 200. If we included an empty XML doc as the response we
again wouldn't be able to give details on why there were no results. If we
included a response doc instead, that complicates the parsing a little,
since the client needs to check the status code and also the root XML
element before knowing what to do next.

So I'm leaning towards sticking with 404 - given that either that tag or the
user were not found, I think it matches the intended meaning well.

But I'm willing to be convinced -- what do you think?

> robert

Ta,
Ben


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