When HTTP 200 OK from API endpoint returns "error"

Primož Kerin — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 12:05:27 +0000

So this happened a while ago but I will post it here also:

I was posting data to some remote API endpoint and it kept returning HTTP response with code 200 OK. This is normally a good sign, but this was it’s content:

{"error": "not present"}

What is your first guess when you see this response content?

OK, so I thought maybe the API always returns 200 and errors in it’s content. This is not the best practice but I’ve seen it a lot in many APIs. Maybe this was an error description of a case when object is not found in a database, but they could return 404 for example.

However, this was not the case here because I asked them what this "error" meant and why are they returning it with 200 OK.

The answer:

"This is normal behavior and it actually means that no errors are present."

Was your guess correct?

DEV Community: Primož Kerin

When HTTP 200 OK from API endpoint returns "error"