API Error Message Format

dev
1

When getting errors back from discourse when using the API, most of them are HTML pages. To handle these errors properly, I need to parse the HTML to determine what went wrong. This is slow. Is there a way to request that the error be sent back in JSON or some other minimal application friendly format? I have tried setting the content type header of the request to application/JSON but this does not seem to help

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2

Can you show us the raw version of the requests that you are sending? You might be missing something since we’re always responding in JSON when asked JSON :wink:

3

Here is a request I am sending to test the scenario where a request is made with a username that does not in fact exist in discourse. I get back a response with an HTML body.

REQUEST { uri: 'http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser',
  method: 'POST',
  useQuerystring: true,
  form: 'title=my%20great%20discussion%20topic.&raw=This%20is%20the%20topic%20for%20discussion%20its%20super%20great%203&category=DefComments&unlist_topic=true&archetype=regular&tags%5B%5D=coolTag',
  headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' },
  callback: [Function] }
REQUEST make request http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser
REQUEST onRequestResponse http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser500 { 'content-type': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
  'content-length': '146597',
  'x-request-id': 'f40207af-b443-4781-a378-49b13c3cc46c',
  'x-runtime': '0.274651',
  'set-cookie': [ '__profilin=p%3Dt; path=/' ],
  connection: 'close',
  server: 'thin' }
REQUEST reading response's body
REQUEST finish init function http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser
REQUEST response end http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser500 { 'content-type': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
  'content-length': '146597',
  'x-request-id': 'f40207af-b443-4781-a378-49b13c3cc46c',
  'x-runtime': '0.274651',
  'set-cookie': [ '__profilin=p%3Dt; path=/' ],
  connection: 'close',
  server: 'thin' }
REQUEST end event http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser
REQUEST has body http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser 146597
REQUEST emitting complete http://10.0.1.15:1234/posts?api_key=[...]&api_username=notauser
4

Can you provide the actual HTTP request that is sent, rather than… whatever that is?

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5

Here is an example where we specify we want json, but because there was an error (the topic couldn’t be found) it returned html.

discourse_postman_html_reponse.gif1267×873 430 KB

3 Likes
6

So there is no way to specify on the request that error messages to be sent back in JSON? Would be a good feature and improve error handling performance and code clarity of any software using the API.

That’s the debug output of the node request module, I’m not sure what other information about the rest request that isn’t included above could be relevant, but if there’s some standard way I’m supposed to capture and display it please enlighten me.