CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsonresthttpapi-design
Daniel Käfer
Daniel Käfer

Reputation: 4704

HTTP status code for a REST search without result

I have a REST endpoint for a search.

GET /person?firstname=john&name=smith

As result a collection with the HTTP status code 200 OK is returned:

[
   {
      "id":11,
      "firstname":"John",
      "name":"Smith",
      "birthday":"1996-03-08"
   },
   {
      "id":18,
      "firstname":"John",
      "name":"Smith",
      "birthday":"1963-07-11"
   }
]

What is the correct HTTP status code and payload for a empty search result?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4210

Answers (3)

JuanR
JuanR

Reputation: 7783

I would recommend:

HTTP Status 200 OK with a empty collection []

The reason is that 204 means there is no content to send back and that is not what the result of your call is.

In your case, there IS something to send back. It's a Json result that happens to be composed of an empty collection.

UPDATE:

From the HTTP protocol definition:

10.2.5 204 No Content: The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation.

And:

The 204 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

Upvotes: 5

Vi Elite
Vi Elite

Reputation: 136

This is a matter of convention here when you are designing your web application. 200 ok with an Empty collection would be my way to go . Because :

  • It proved that your API does return response
  • Handling 200 would be much easier on client-side , as I may assume you are working with Javascript , where other response code might throw you an error

Upvotes: 2

LLL
LLL

Reputation: 3771

IMO the first case:

  • HTTP Status 200 OK with a empty collection []

Then you don't have to check for the 204 and use what is returned, which is an empty list.

Upvotes: 4

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