Question

When ever i try to retrieve the google plus post of a particular user,
i get the following message

{ “error”: { “errors”: [ { “domain”: “buzz”, “reason”: “backendError”, “message”: “Backend Error” } ], “code”: 503, “message”: “Backend Error” } }

The query fails only for few peoples (consistently) but still it’s
important for me, below is the query which i am using.

https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/“user_id”/activities/public?
maxResults=100&key=”Api_key”

And when ever i try to retrieve the posts of a user for whom the above
query works perfectly, i am only able to retrieve last 250 posts.

Is there a way to retrieve all the post which they have posted so far?

Answer 1

I was having this issue as well, and the problem I was running into was that I was storing profile IDs in JavaScript as Number values, which was chopping off precision. So 113735310430199015092 was being rounded to 113735310430199020000. The lesson there is to always store Google+ profile IDs as String values in JavaScript.

So the ‘backendError’ was basically being thrown due to an invalid or otherwise inaccessible profile ID.

Now, I’m not sure if that’s the exact issue you’re running into, since ‘backendError’ is fairly generic, and a 5xx HTTP code says nothing about the validity of your response, but it’s something to watch out for. I’m hoping in the future the API will return a more useful 4xx status code for these error cases.