Re: [apps-discuss] Partially fulfilled / draft-nottingham-http-new-status

["Markus Lanthaler" <[e-mail]>]

Mark,

I've considered 202 Accepted but it has a completely different meaning. 202
is defined as:

  "The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not
   been completed. The request might or might not eventually be acted
upon.."

I proposed to introduce a new status code for requests that have been fully
processed but could just be fulfilled partially. Thinking more about it I
came up with another example where this might be very useful.

Assume we have a Web service. Clients send requests and everything works
fine -> 200 OK. At a certain point in time the Web service adds new
optional(!) functionality which is not critical and clients start to use it.
A simple example could be that clients transmit some additional data. If the
server gets updated as well and understand all the data, again a 200 OK is
fine.

But if a server is not updated to the latest version it might understand
just parts of the request (the critical part) and simply ignore the other
parts. To tell the client that it successfully processed the request but
didn't understand parts of the request he would return a, e.g., 209
Partially Fulfilled.

I think such a behaviour would be very important in evolving systems. As far
as I know, there are currently only two ways to deal with it: either process
the request and return a 200 OK signalling everything was OK or ignoring the
request and returning a 400 Bad Request.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler