Question

Let’s say that I have a service that returns customer information by a given id. If it’s not found I return null.

My app calls this services like this:

http.get('http://myserver/myservice/customer/123', function(res) {
    res.on('data', function(d) {
        callback(null, d);
    });
}).on('error', function(e) {
    callback(e);
});

Currently my service responds with 200 but no data.

How do I handle when no data is returned?

Should I change it to return a different http code? In this case how to handle this? I tried many different approaches without success.

Answer 1

I finally found a way to solve my problem:

http.get('http://myserver/myservice/customer/123', function(res) {
    var data = '';

    response.on('data', function(d) {
        data += d;
    });

    response.on('end', function() {
        if (data != '') {
            callback(null, data);
        }
        else {
            callback('No customer was found');
        } 
    });
}).on('error', function(e) {
    callback(e);
});

This solves the problem, but I’m also going to adopt josh3736’s suggestion and return a 404 on my service when the customer is not found.