http-status-codes

It is unclear to me when you should and should not return a HTTP 412: Precondition Failed, error for a web service? I am thinking of using it when validating data. For example, if a client POST's XML data and that data is missing a required data element, then responding with a 412 and a description of the error. Does that align with the spirit of responding with an HTTP 412, or should something else be used (e.g. another http error code or web application exception)? If you look at RFC 2616 you'll see a number of request headers that can be used to apply conditions to a request: If-Match If

A similar question is posted here: What's an appropriate HTTP status code to return by a REST API service for a validation failure? The answer in the thread above states that "For instance if the URI is supposed to have an ISO-8601 date and you find that it's in the wrong format or refers to February 31st, then you would return an HTTP 400. Ditto if you expect well-formed XML in an entity body and it fails to parse." However, what happens if the user submitted correctly formatted data? By this I mean, the user submitted a plain alphabetical string / text for the username and password (which is

I have an application that sends messages to users. In a post request a XML string is transferred that consists of all the users that should receive that particular message. If any of the users in the list do not exist I give the list of missing users back to the client for further evaluation. Now I'm asking myself what would be the proper status code for the application saying that the request was accepted but there were things that couldn't be done. The problem would be avoided if it weren't allowed to include missing users in the list. Then the sending attempt would just get an 4xx error.

In a webpage, it uses YUI connection manager/datasource to send AJAX requests to the server, if the session (which contains the info on whether the user has been authenticated) has already timed out, those ajax responses that can only be viewed by authenticated users should return an http status code, telling the client that the session has already timed out, then the client either simply redirects him to the login page or asks him if he wants to extend the session. My question is that, in this situation, what http status code is the most appropriate to tell the client the session has timed

Is there an easy way to get the HTTP status code from a System.Net.WebException ? Maybe something like this... try { // ... } catch (WebException ex) { if (ex.Status == WebExceptionStatus.ProtocolError) { var response = ex.Response as HttpWebResponse; if (response != null) { Console.WriteLine("HTTP Status Code: " + (int)response.StatusCode); } else { // no http status code available } } else { // no http status code available } } Martin Liversage By using the null-conditional operator ( ?. ) you can get the HTTP status code with a single line of code: HttpStatusCode? status = (ex.Response as

How to get the code of the headers through urllib? The getcode() method (Added in python2.6) returns the HTTP status code that was sent with the response, or None if the URL is no HTTP URL. >>> a=urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com/asdfsf') >>> a.getcode() 404 >>> a=urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com/') >>> a.getcode() 200 Joe Holloway You can use urllib2 as well: import urllib2 req = urllib2.Request('http://www.python.org/fish.html') try: resp = urllib2.urlopen(req) except urllib2.HTTPError as e: if e.code == 404: # do something... else: # ... except urllib2.URLError as e: # Not an HTTP