Re: How to express no matching results in HTTP SEARH method?

On Wed, Nov 04, 2020 at 08:24:59AM -0500,
 Sawood Alam <ibnesayeed@gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 105 lines which said:

> The question remains open, "how to express a successful SEARCH
> response with an unsuccessful search result when returning an entity
> body is desired?" Does it warrant a new 2xx status code? I think
> this will be a common situation for many people who would be willing
> to migrate their GET-style searching where they could use a 404 to
> express it.

Note that there was a very similar discussion during the
standardization of DNS-over-HTTPS (RFC 8484). The decision was that
200 is the proper code even if the DNS request was unsuccessful. To
quote the RFC "For example, a successful 2xx HTTP status code is used
even with a DNS message whose DNS response code indicates failure,
such as SERVFAIL or NXDOMAIN."

The rationale being "HTTP succeeded, so 200, even if DNS failed".

Replace DNS by SEARCH and I think the reasoning still holds.

Received on Thursday, 5 November 2020 11:08:21 UTC