Till Harbaum / Lists wrote: > Am Sonntag 07 September 2008 schrieb Tom Hughes: >> A single line text message is clearly not appropriate for a 404 caused >> by using the wrong URL though as we have no idea if that came from a web >> browser or a program using the API and in the web browser case we want >> to send an HTML response. > > If this happens while someone is accessing the api/xxx path on the server > we can be quite confident that it's not a browser but a program accessing > the api.
The 404 is generated by rails though, when it fails to find a route, and I'm not sure if you can easily make that conditioned on a partial match of the URL - you might be able to if you had some sort of explicit route that generated a 404 manually I guess. >> In fact it's far more likely that it is a web browser as any program >> that is sending the wrong URL is presumably only ever going to do so for >> a short period while it is in development while a web user can type in >> the wrong URL at any time. > > You mean there are more people trying to access the api branch on the server > with the web browser than people with real api aware software trying > to access the server and running into problems there? The server doesn't really have a concept of an "API branch". It just has a set of rules for routing URLs to controllers which handle both API URLs and other URLs. > IMHO the question is: What problems do we want to catch and address? Do > we care for people accessing the api via their web browser and do we want to > make sure they get useful error messages? Or do we want to make sure that > software like josm and friends have a simple method of returning error > information? The Error header is our officially sanctioned way of returning machine readable error information - it is what JOSM displays to the user for example. Yes I know we don't set it as often as we should. I'm not especially bothered about providing browser friendly responses to API errors. >> If you want to improve our error handling though then please do feel >> free - I'm sure you know where the repository is. > I won't just patch other peoples software without having asked why things > are the way they are and without having come to the conclusion that my ideas > are sufficient better than yours. You say that you think the 404 should remain > valid html to make sure all browsers display it correctly and that ok with me. > > Anyway, i can really live with the current state. I wasn't sure if this > inconsistency > is by purpose and thought that someone may want to think about this. It's the way it is because that's how whoever wrote each piece of code did it - improvements are always welcome. Tom -- Tom Hughes ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.compton.nu/ _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
