Correct HTTP REST API status code for incorrect CSV file upload

Question

I'm currently consuming a REST API endpoint for bulk creation of entities via csv file upload.

POST /entity/csv
Content-Type: multipart/form-data

With form-data:

key	value
file	binary

The backend is currently returning a 400 status code when it can't parse the csv file, however the request sent from the client is actually correct.

From my point of view, this is not the way to go, and it should return a 200, with additional info on the parsing issues. Currently, the parsing errors are on the 400 response body.

Is there any case to be made for the 400 status code when there are failures in the parsing? E.g. "required field is empty - line 43"

What's the consensus around this?

I'm asking this as a frontend developer, because I'm writing frontend logic for displaying the parsing errors to the user inside a catch block, which seems odd to me.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-07 13:31:19Z

0

What's the consensus around this?

Status codes are metadata of the "transfer documents over a network domain".

If you are dealing with a request like...

POST /entity/csv HTTP/?.?
Content-Type: text/csv

a,b,c....

Then the guidelines you want to follow are probably those in RFC 4918

If the body isn't actually a CSV document, then use a 400 Bad Request
If the body is the wrong CSV document, then use 422 Unprocessable Entity.

In practice, while there is a semantic difference between 400, 422, 403, etc..., it's not clear that general purpose clients can do anything with those differences.

With either code, the body of the response would be "a representation containing an explanation of the error". It's in this place that you would put your specific notes about what problems were encountered by the parser.

The reason that it wants to be a 4xx rather than a 2xx is caching, and cache-invalidation.

edited Oct 7, 2021 at 13:31

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 17, 2021 at 1:34

VoiceOfUnreason

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1 Comment

ThibaultV Over a year ago

Hi there, I have to clarify: the content-type is multipart/form-data. With the request body being { file: <binary> }. I edited the original question

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