Question

I have service that takes some entity and needs to save/update this entity:

http://myhost.com/rest/entity

I use POST and submit JSON. Inside service it detects that entity passed is not good. Not valid, order passed in with customer that doesn not exist, etc.

How should I reply? HttpCode.NotFound? Or others? How do you reply to such things?

Answer 1

In our project in such situations we do the following:

1. Set response code to HTTP 400 Bad Request
2. Set response body to the following JSON: {"message":"%extended error message here%"}

But it’s really very subjective.

Also I’d suggest reading This blog article on RESTfull error handling – it describes many available options, so you can choose something for your taste.