Background
Some of our API’s return 404’s for Not Found or Null. Unfortunately, our APM systems see all 400+ status codes as errors, so these response are creating a lot of noise in error logs. So, we want to have a conversation around “What should be returned when we can’t find a record in a database?”
Prior Discussions
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What are we currently doing?
null values | ARIT | SA |
|---|---|---|
Notes | We just used whatever Microsoft had as their default implementation | |
Single Value | 200 - {} | 200 - null |
List Value | 200 - [] | 200 - [] |
https://developer.ucsb.edu/docs/publishers/guidelines-and-standards
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Discussion
The diference in the Single Values comes down to the approaches each group is doing in their domain models.
In ARIT, they are always trying to keep the same “object shape”. So, if a function is supposed to return a Person object, then it must return either a populated Person object or a Person.Empty object.
In SA, they return null when a record isn’t found in the database. So, their functions can return a Person object or null.
Gary
If we make any changes to any API’s, then we would bump the major version number and implement the new return types on that.
At some point in the future, I think it would be good to revisit the Fusion API because it’s returning a lot of data, when we only need a little (just the changes)
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