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Lets say there's a Product with Orders. If you ask for /products/product_id, it will return a 404 if product_id doesn't exist. But should /products/product_id/orders return a 404 if no orders exist for this product or should it return an empty array?
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Based on the code above, is it correct to return a NOT_FOUND status ( 404 ), or should I be returning 204 , or some other more appropriate code? If you would expect a resource to be there, because it is looked up using an ID, then a 404 is expected. Something goes wrong, the resource you need to be there is not found.
If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead.
You fix this by opening the listen step in your VSM file, and changing the base path in there, so you don't get a 404 error. You could change that to "/api/" so any api requests are dealt-with, or "/api/retrieveId/" so only retrieveId messages are dealt-with, or "/" so all requests are dealt-with.
The API should always return sensible HTTP status codes. API errors typically break down into 2 types: 400 series status codes for client issues & 500 series status codes for server issues. At a minimum, the API should standardize that all 400 series errors come with consumable JSON error representation.
I would return an empty collection. A product with zero orders is a completely valid concept, so the existence of an empty orders collection makes more sense than a 404 which would infer that this product does not have a orders collection.
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