What s the most appropriate HTTP status code for an item not found error page

Question

I m curious what s the most appropriate HTTP status code for an  item does not exist  page     If the page itself doesn t exist  I ll obviously use 404  However  one of my pages has a userid argument  it s an  edit user  page  and in case no user with the given user ID exists I m displaying an error page  but I d also like to send a 4xx status header  since  200 OK  doesn t really fit      I guess 404 would be ok since it s  not found  and not  file not found   but I wonder if there s a better code for this case

User · Answer

code 422 Unprocessable Entity      see  lt a href  quot https   tools ietf org html rfc4918 section-11 2 quot  gt WebDAV lt  a gt     UNPROCESSABLE ENTITY 422   quot Unprocessable Entity quot

User · Answer

Getting overly clever with obscure-er HTTP error codes is a bad idea  Browsers sometimes react in unhelpful ways that obfuscate the situation  Stick with 404

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Since it s a user-facing page always use 404  It s the only code people know usually

User · Answer

404 is just fine  HTTP 1 1 Status Code Definitions from RFC2616

User · Answer

A 404 return code actually means  resource not found   and applies to any entity for which a request was made but not satisfied  So it works equally-well for pages  subsections of pages  and any item that exists on the page which has a specific request to be rendered   So 404 is the right code to use in this scenario  Note that it doesn t apply to  server not found   which is a different situation in which a request was issued but not answered at all  as opposed to answered but without the resource requested

User · Answer

That s depending if userid is a resource identifier or additional parameter  If it is then it s ok to return 404 if not you might return other code like  400  bad request  - indicates a bad request or 412  Precondition Failed  e g  conflict by performing conditional update  More info in free InfoQ Explores  REST book

User · Answer

204   No Content     This code means that the server has successfully processed the request  but is not going to return any content  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTTP Status 204

[http] What's the most appropriate HTTP status code for an "item not found" error page

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