Re: AW: Use of Status Code 500

Svensson, Lars wrote:
> In litteris suis de Mittwoch, 2. September 2009 11:02, Henrik Nordstrom
> <mailto:henrik@henriknordstrom.net>scripsit:
> 
>> ons 2009-09-02 klockan 08:53 +0200 skrev Svensson, Lars:
>>> At my place we're a bit unsure of the use of Status Code 500. One of
>>> our apps (a distributed one) returns a SC 500 when there is a
>>> communication errror with one of the subsystems.
>> Sounds reasonable to me. 500 is "unspecified server failure".
> 
> Thanks for your reply. It turned out to be a bit different than I first
> said: It's not a communication error that causes the malfunction, but a
> bug in the application that causes an exception to be thrown when data
> from the subsystem is processed. Would you still agree that SC 500 is
> reasonable, or (since we know about the exception and can catch it) that
> an error page serving SC 200 and the error message would be more
> appropriate?

OMG, no. 500 is *exactly* what you want in that case.

Status 200 would mean that automated applications get content and assume 
everything is fine.

>> 500 is "unspecified server failure".
> 
> If 500 is "unspecified", is there any way I can specify the error? I
> haven't really found anything in the spec...

You can send details in the response body (but I assume you already do 
that :-).

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Thursday, 3 September 2009 14:16:04 UTC