REST API error code 500 handling

Question

We are building a new REST API   I was arguing that error code 500  Internal Server Error  should never be returned   Now  of course if you know the client s params are wrong or something you have everything under control and can return some appropriate error code  e g  422    So if an unexpected error occurs the server could    NOT catch unexpected errors so that 500 bubbles up to the client Catch any unexpected errors and return some error code signaling an  unexpected situation   honestly I couldn t find any such error code     Are there other options

User · Answer

You suggested  Catching any unexpected errors and return some error code signaling  unexpected situation    but couldn t find an appropriate error code    Guess what  That s what 5xx is there for

User · Answer

It is a server error  not a client error  If server errors weren t to be returned to the client  there wouldn t have been created an entire status code class for them  i e  5xx    You can t hide the fact that you either made a programming error or some service you rely on is unavailable  and that certainly isn t the client s fault  Returning any other range of code in those cases than the 5xx series would make no sense   RFC 7231 mentions in section 6 6  Server Error 5xx      The 5xx  Server Error  class of status code indicates that the server      is aware that it has erred or is incapable of performing the      requested method    This is exactly the case  There s nothing  internal  about the code  500 Internal Server Error  in the sense that it shouldn t be exposed to the client

User · Answer

Generally speaking  5xx response codes indicate non-programmatic failures  such as a database connection failure  or some other system library dependency failure   In many cases  it is expected that the client can re-submit the same request in the future and expect it to be successful   Yes  some web-frameworks will respond with 5xx codes  but those are typically the result of defects in the code and the framework is too abstract to know what happened  so it defaults to this type of response  that example  however  doesn t mean that we should be in the habit of returning 5xx codes as the result of programmatic behavior that is unrelated to out of process systems  There are many  well defined response codes that are more suitable than the 5xx codes   Being unable to parse validate a given input is not a 5xx response because the code can accommodate a more suitable response that won t leave the client thinking that they can resubmit the same request  when in fact  they can not   To be clear  if the error encountered by the server was due to CLIENT input  then this is clearly a CLIENT error and should be handled with a 4xx response code   The expectation is that the client will correct the error in their request and resubmit   It is completely acceptable  however  to catch any out of process errors and interpret them as a 5xx response  but be aware that you should also include further information in the response to indicate exactly what failed  and even better if you can include SLA times to address   I don t think it s a good practice to interpret   an unexpected error  as a 5xx error because bugs happen   It is a common alert monitor to begin alerting on 5xx types of errors because these typically indicate failed systems  rather than failed code  So  code accordingly

User · Answer

The real question is why does it generate a 500 error  If it is related to any input parameters  then I would argue that it should be handled internally and returned as a 400 series error  Generally a 400  404 or 406 would be appropriate to reflect bad input since the general convention is that a RESTful resource is uniquely identified by the URL and a URL that cannot generate a valid response is a bad request  400  or similar   If the error is caused by anything other than the inputs explicitly or implicitly supplied by the request  then I would say a 500 error is likely appropriate  So a failed database connection or other unpredictable error is accurately represented by a 500 series error

User · Answer

80   of the times  this would due to wrong input by in soapRequest xml file

[api] REST API error code 500 handling

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