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

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Why is it necessary to surface this information in the status code? E.g., will intermediaries or automated software that's not specific to the application at hand be able to use it? 

Regards,


On 06/12/2011, at 4:46 PM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:

> 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
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/