[Mailman-Developers] REST API returns are plain text for errors, JSON or nothing for successful

Andrew Stuart andrew.stuart at supercoders.com.au
Sat Jan 10 20:23:43 CET 2015


Hmmm.

Happy to do so if you like.  Would you mind pointing me in the direction of some instructions for filing bugs please?

FWIW I’d probably favor a REST API that is behaving improperly by returning plain text error responses (i.e. the current situation) rather than a REST API that returns application/json content type for valid responses and text/plain for errors.  Once that gets baked into release 1 it’ll be challenging to correct back to application/json later because people will write clients to expect text/plain for errors. 

It’s a whole lot easier conceptually to deal with a REST API that always returns the same content-type regardless of the outcome of the API call. 

Some REST tools don’t have any mechanism for defining mixed response type APIs which leads to some weird outcomes when querying successfully versus getting errors.  In short, I’d leave as-is and eventually turn the error text into json, but obviously Barry you should say what you want.

as



On 11 Jan 2015, at 6:10 am, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:

On Jan 11, 2015, at 06:06 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

> I don’t think it’s a big deal in the short term because the plain text error
> message can easily be read from the response.
> 
> The only thing that’s somewhat odd is that the content-type is
> application/json even though the content isn’t (for error messages).

That, at least, is a bug.  Care to file one?

Cheers,
-Barry
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