CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rest
Pez
Pez

Reputation: 1299

Structuring a RESTful service to respond when no results found

I'm building a RESTful service with Symfony2.

It has a search function which returns a search entity, the entity has an array of results.

If the user performs an improper search there are a few different messages I may need to send them. Thus, My thought on how to structure the response is:

For a good search:

{
  "message": "OK",
  "search": <insert search object here>
}

and for a bad search:

{
  "message: "Please double check your search in such and such fashion"
}

Essentially, always sending a "message" but not always sending a search entity, as one will not have been created if their search failed in certain ways.

Then, I will always return a 200 response, even when their search criteria were off. Or, if there were no results.

Does this jive with the thinking behind REST, or should I be changing the response to a 404 or something?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 82

Answers (1)

Ergin
Ergin

Reputation: 9356

I think it depends on how you want to structure your RESTful service. When you say If the user performs an improper search to me that sounds like the user is using bad syntax in the search or doing something else wrong, as opposed to a properly formatted search that simply returns no results.

If that's the case I think most REST services return 400 - bad request, or some other error code in the 400 range.

Also, I think most REST services would return the search entity in the response body.

Upvotes: 2

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