Error Reporting

HAL does a great job of defining a generic mediatype for resources with relational links. However, how do you go about reporting errors? HAL is silent on the issue.

REST advocates indicate that HTTP response status codes should be used, but little has been done to standardize on the response format.

For JSON APIs, though, two formats are starting to achieve large adoption: vnd.error and API-Problem. In PhlyRestfully, I have provided support for returning Api-Problem payloads.

API-Problem

This mediatype, application/api-problem+json is via the IETF, and actually also includes an XML variant. The structure includes the following properties:

  • describedBy: a URL to a document describing the error condition (required)
  • title: a brief title for the error condition (required)
  • httpStatus: the HTTP status code for the current request (optional)
  • detail: error details specific to this request (optional)
  • supportId: a URL to the specific problem occurrence (e.g., to a log message) (optional)

As an example payload:

HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Error
Content-Type: application/api-problem+json

{
    "describedBy": "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html",
    "detail": "Status failed validation",
    "httpStatus": 500,
    "title": "Internal Server Error"
}

The specification allows a large amount of flexibility – you can have your own custom error types, so long as you have a description of them to link to. You can provide as little or as much detail as you want, and even decide what information to expose based on environment.

PhlyRestfully Choices

The specification indicates that every error needs to include a “describedBy” field, pointing to a URI with more information on the problem type. Often, when you start a project, you may not want to worry about this up front – the HTTP status code may be enough to begin. As such, PhlyRestfully assumes that if you do not provide a “describedBy” field, it will link to the URI describing the HTTP status codes.

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