Exceptions and Exception Handling

Status: Draft

In programming, errors are referred to as "exceptions". The mechanisms that return useful information about errors are called "exception handlers". The NCMNS API exception handler returns a custom JSON response body with detailed information about the error(s) for human and machine consumers. In addition, the handler returns a short description of suggested actions the end-user may take to resolve the error(s). More than three dozen HTTP status codes belong to the official IANA Registry (https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-status-codes.xhtml). The NCMNS API exception handler is targeted to a carefully chosen subset of status codes at the 300- and 400-level applicable to API response bodies, provided in the HTTP Status Codes documentation (https://data.naturalsciences.org/docs/0.1/specifications/http-status-codes).

The NCMNS API response schema design is the product of multiple existing schemas that include the resources below.

Last Modified: 2022-04-25