Is it wrong to return 202 “Accepted” in response to HTTP GET?

Question

I have a set of resources whose representations are lazily created. The computation to construct these representations can take anywhere from a few milliseconds to a few hou

Answer 1

In case of a resource that is supposed to have a representation of an entity that is clearly specified by an ID (as opposed to a "factory" resource, as described in the question), I recommend staying with the GET method and, in a situation when the entity/representation is not available because of lazy-creation or any other temporary situation, use the 503 Service Unavailable response code that is more appropriate and was actually designed for situations like this one.

Reasoning for this can be found in the RFCs for HTTP itself (please verify the description of the 503 response code), as well as on numerous other resources.

Please compare with HTTP status code for temporarily unavailable pages. Although that question is about a different use case, it actually relates to the exact same feature of HTTP.