Comment 0 for bug 716174

Revision history for this message
Martin Pool (mbp) wrote : api error messages should be machine-readable

  affects launchpad
  status triaged
  importance low
  tags api error-reporting

At the moment if an API call fails with, for example, a 503 or 500
oops, you get back a quite large page of html. It would be a bit more
useful to most clients if we instead sent either plain text or json
description of the problem (including the oops if any), or at least if
we made the html more easily machine-parsable by making it xhtml with
defined ids. But many clients will want to just print the failure,
and for them something short would be better.