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?
Top comments (1)
Couldn't really guess.
But in such a case, it'd better to return 204. It's built for exactly this purpose, when request was successful and there's no payload that has to be brought back.