Let's say I'm a server responding to a request to do a bulk create of some entity. Let's say that I've also decided to make it so that if one instance of the entity can't be created, due to a server error or user error, I will still create the other entity instances. In this scenario what should I return? A 201 because I created most of the entities in the request? Or A 4xx/5xx since there was an error while creating one of the entities?
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3 Answers
If you return a 4xx code it implies that the entire request has failed, and the server-state has not changed.
If the intent of the request is to do 'one or more things and some may fail', then a partial application is still a success, so that puts in the 2XX range.
206 is not a good idea. This is specifically for requests that use Range, which is not the case here.
207 could be used. You'll probably want to define a custom format instead of the default XML-based on. My vote would probably just go to 200.
Also, consider just doing many requests. Requests are cheap, why lump them together? Now each request can have their own beautiful, accurate status code.
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In that case you could return a multi-status (207) response where you acknowledge the result for each batch entry. That way the client would have a complete awareness of the results. However, that type of HTTP status involves more complex processing on the client-side.
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I think 201 is not a good choice because it says "Accepted" which mean everything is alright. But not in your case. Maybe 206 is a good idea which means "Partial Content" according to Wiki "The server is delivering only part of the resource..."
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stackh34p
I do not know why this was downvoted. It acutally makes sense to me to return acknowledgement of successful batch entries in a 206 status code and then proceed with a 4xx for the errors in the rest. And I totally agree that 201 is not OK when things went wrong on the server.