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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

It might be to formal for your use-case, but there is a standard defined for error responses in RFC 7807:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7807

Wow, I had never seen an API with errors at this level of detail… I feel lucky when they at least use sane status codes instead of always giving back 200 and a maybe-json-maybe-plaintext-maybe-empty body…

I’d love to hear from anyone who has encountered APIs in the wild that actually implement this standard!

ASP.NET Core uses ProblemDetails ~~by default~~.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/web-api/handle-...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.aspnet...

I used to work at Akamai and Problem Details is used in most of their APIs. It might have something to do with the fact that one of the RFC authors (Mark Nottingham / @mnot on HN) worked there for a while.

I've used both Problem Details and JSONAPI errors[0] which are basically the same idea (and I've used them plenty outside of JSONAPI-proper APIs). In both cases if you have a decent error-handling middleware there should be not much difference than outputting any other kind of errors.

One thing to keep in mind re. "maybe-json-maybe-plaintext-maybe-empty" responses is that the more complex your errors, the more likely the error handling encounters an error. If you're trying to send back some JSON or XML but it fails it's usually better to at least shove out a line of plain text and hope it reaches a human than to mask the real error with a second fallback in the "right format" but with unhelpful fixed content.

[0] https://jsonapi.org/format/#error-objects

I use Problem Details in most APIs I build. It’s as simple to generate a Problem Detail as it is to generate ad-hoc errors, but you can re-use code.

I think stripe is close to having decent API in this regard

That is stupid. Most of our failed requests are logged and logs are only read by dashboards and alarms. Sure, you can have a friendly message too but formalizing the errors in a structured way simplifies things and also improves the performance when scanning through large amount of logs.

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