Passing invalid ID to an endpoint: how to handle such a case? - java

Consider /v1/api/people/{id} endpoint handling GET, PUT and DELETE operations, where id is an integer.
I am wondering about how the below two cases should typically be handled?
a). when passed id does not exists in database, e.g. id = 100 but there is no entity of such id
b). when passed id is of wrong type e.g. it is a string "oops"
Imagine that both of above errors never actually happen as far as the real application is concerned (because e.g. application has "correct" workflow and some client-side validation).
However, I can still cause the above errors in let's say Postman or if something changes in the future, right? I want to prevent those errors in the future.
Should it be left as HTTP 500 or perhaps should it be handled as HTTP 400 or HTTP 404? Is HTTP 500 ever acceptable?

HTTP 500 - should be used as Internal Server Error meaning something unexpected happened in server side .. above errors should be part of validation ideally since they are known scenarios
a). when passed id does not exists in database, e.g. id = 100 but there is no entity of such id
here you should return 404(Not Found) with error msg like 'resource with id 100 not present for deletion/update etc' to make it user friendly
b). when passed id is of wrong type e.g. it is a string "oops"
here you should show 400 (BadRequest) since user is not passing value as per agreement that is resource id.

Related

Hyperledger Fabric - Java-SDK - Future completed exceptionally: sendTransaction

I'm running an HL Fabric private network and submitting transactions to the ledger from a Java Application using Fabric-Java-Sdk.
Occasionally, like 1/10000 of the times, the Java application throws an exception when I'm submitting the transaction to the ledger, like the message below:
ERROR 196664 --- [ Thread-4] org.hyperledger.fabric.sdk.Channel
: Future completed exceptionally: sendTransaction
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The proposal responses have 2
inconsistent groups with 0 that are invalid. Expected all to be
consistent and none to be invalid. at
org.hyperledger.fabric.sdk.Channel.doSendTransaction(Channel.java:5574)
~[fabric-sdk-java-2.1.1.jar:na] at
org.hyperledger.fabric.sdk.Channel.sendTransaction(Channel.java:5533)
~[fabric-sdk-java-2.1.1.jar:na] at
org.hyperledger.fabric.gateway.impl.TransactionImpl.commitTransaction(TransactionImpl.java:138)
~[fabric-gateway-java-2.1.1.jar:na] at
org.hyperledger.fabric.gateway.impl.TransactionImpl.submit(TransactionImpl.java:96)
~[fabric-gateway-java-2.1.1.jar:na] at
org.hyperledger.fabric.gateway.impl.ContractImpl.submitTransaction(ContractImpl.java:50)
~[fabric-gateway-java-2.1.1.jar:na] at
com.apidemoblockchain.RepositoryDao.BaseFunctions.Implementations.PairTrustBaseFunction.sendTrustTransactionMessage(PairTrustBaseFunction.java:165)
~[classes/:na] at
com.apidemoblockchain.RepositoryDao.Implementations.PairTrustDataAccessRepository.run(PairTrustDataAccessRepository.java:79)
~[classes/:na] at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:834)
~[na:na]
While my submitting method goes like this:
public void sendTrustTransactionMessage(Gateway gateway, Contract trustContract, String payload) throws TimeoutException, InterruptedException, InvalidArgumentException, TransactionException, ContractException {
// Prepare
checkIfChannelIsReady(gateway);
// Execute
trustContract.submitTransaction(getCreateTrustMethod(), payload);
}
I'm using a 4 org network with 2 peers each and I am using 3 channels, one for each chaincode DataType, in order to keep the things clean.
I think that the error coming from the Channel doesn't make sense because I am using the Contract to submit it...
Like I'm opening the gateway and then I keep it open for continuously submit the txs.
try (Gateway gateway = getBuilder(getTrustPeer()).connect()) {
Contract trustContract = gateway.getNetwork(getTrustChaincodeChannelName()).getContract(getTrustChaincodeId(), getTrustChaincodeName());
while (!terminateLoop) {
if (message) {
String payload = preparePayload();
sendTrustTransactionMessage(gateway, trustContract, payload);
}
...
wait();
}
...
}
EDIT:
After reading #bestbeforetoday advice, I've managed to catch the ContractException and analyze the logs. Still, I don't fully understand where might be the bug and, therefore, how to fix it.
I'll add 3 prints that I've taken to the ProposalResponses received in the exception and a comment after it.
ProposalResponses-1
ProposalResponses-2
ProposalResponses-3
So, in the first picture, I can see that 3 proposal responses were received at the exception and the exception cause message says:
"The proposal responses have 2 inconsistent groups with 0 that are invalid. Expected all to be consistent and none to be invalid."
In pictures, 2/3 is represented the content of those responses and I notice that there are 2 fields saving null value, namely "ProposalRespondePayload" and "timestamp_", however, I don't know if those are the "two groups" referred at the message cause of the exception.
Thanks in advance...
It seems that, while the endorsing peers all successfully endorsed your transaction proposal, those peer responses were not all byte-for-byte identical.
There are several things that might differ, including read/write sets or the value returned from the transaction function invocation. There are several reasons why differences might occur, including non-deterministic transaction function implementation, different transaction function behaviour between peers, or different ledger state at different peers.
To figure out what caused this specific failure you probably need to look at the peer responses to identify how they differ. You should be getting a ContractException thrown back from your transaction submit call, and this should allow you to access the proposal responses by calling e.getProposalResponses():
https://hyperledger.github.io/fabric-gateway-java/release-2.2/org/hyperledger/fabric/gateway/ContractException.html#getProposalResponses()

Best way to handle badly written external exception?

I have an external service I'm calling that just returns 500's with the SAME exception each time no matter the issue.
For example(my api to their service):
Action: Fetch image that does not exist
IMGException: Status code: 500, ErrMsg: File not found
Action: Fetch image that does exist but there are server side issues
IMGException: Status code: 500, ErrMsg: Cannot grab img at this time
Action: Fetch image that does exist but is expired
IMGException: Status code: 500, ErrMsg: Img is expired
What would be the best way to handle this? I was catching them and giving them more descriptive messages to throw to my #ExceptionHandler for logging, etc. Should I just throw them and never catch them since I cannot dependably predict what the exception is caused from and therefore cannot correctly change the status code or message?
You can parse the ErrMsg and throw your own exceptions. But Since the response is from an external service, you can as well include the message from external service in the response to your API in a separate field like ExternalMessage.
This will help the users in case the response from external API changes and you end up throwing a different exception.
I recommend you to simply rethrow these exceptions with the information that the server sends to you and add any information you have. But do not add new information based on what you recieved (with if's, for example), because if they change something your code will just be deprecated.
Of course, never show crypt messages to your final user. In this case add some generic message with instructions about what they can do.

Correct way to handle a REST API path that can be called synchronously or asynchronously

I'm working on a Spring Boot REST API that handles document and can launch a check on a document.
I have a document resource: /doc:
Create a doc with POST /doc
Rest of the CRUD actions with /doc/{id}
Now I can launch a check on a doc, check can be seen either as an action or as a sub-resource.
It's pretty straightforward to launch (create) a check on a document: POST /doc/{id}/check
The check can however take some time so I want to give the user the choice to launch a synchronous or asynchronous check.
How would I handle this path wise?
Should the user choose sync or async check through a query parameter on POST /doc/{id}/check?
Should I create 2 separate paths?
Also in the case of an async check, I would create a temporary Task resource that can be pooled to know the status of the check.
But then if both check and task are returned from the same path it gets confusing, no?
I read an article that says the resource returned in async should be a check resource filled as much as possible but with a link to the task that can be pooled.
That seems like a good way; I would return a partial check if async with a link to the /task/{id} associated with the check.
However I'm still confused as to what path my API should offer to let the user pick between sync and async checks.
How would you handle it path and resource wise?
Basically it's up to you. Usually if it's a big chunk of data you want to query like /resource/{id} most APIs I have used use GET for synchronous requests and POST for async request returning task or job ID.
For POST in your case if the creation/checking takes time I would consider always doing it asynchronous and returning HTTP 202 Accepted and doc/{id}/check/{id} url where the user can see the result if it is ready or some status that it is still working.
If you want to give them a choice to wait or not it's up to you how to do it. There is a standard header that can be used to modify behavior. For example Expect: 202-accepted for async calls and no header or Expect: 201-created for synchronous calls. This makes the API a bit less clear even though it is a standard. Most people (including me) would probably stick to adding a parameter to the URL for clarification. I don't think it should be in the POST data because it should be data related to the object you are creating
There are multiple questions here. I would try to answer one by one
Checking the health of a resource can be done with query param
/doc/{id} - GET Get the resource details
/doc/{id}?healthCheck=true&async=true GET - Get the resource details and trigger an async health check
For the async health check the response as you mentioned will be 202 and the response contains the link to the health status URL
HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Location: /doc/12345/status
If the client sends a GET request to this endpoint, the response should contain the current status of the request. Optionally, it could also include an estimated time to completion or a link to cancel the operation.
Reference
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/best-practices/api-design

Tomcat request logging - how to?

Env: Tomcat 7.
Would like to log http requests and their headers. Actually I could do without the headers as long as I can log the IP address of the caller, the resource he's requesting (the URL) and the type of request (GET, POST, etc)
This may seem like a trivial question, but it really isn't.
The standard way would be to use the AccessLogValve, but as far as I understand that one is actually not request logging, it is request/response logging, meaning that it will not log anything before at the end of the response cycle. It will only log those requests where a response has successfully been delivered to the http client. If something goes wrong before that AccessLogValve will not log the request.
Question 1: Is this correctly understood?
Question 2: Are there other options?
UPDATE 1:
I've done a test with Tomcat7 using a dummy-servlet that does blocking for x seconds based on an URL parameter. My findings are that indeed that request gets logged by the AccessLogValve ... although as expected this does not happen until the end of the response, i.e. after the x seconds. There will be a log entry regardless if the client has aborted before the request finishes and regardless if the servlet throws an exception during processing.
Therefore the answer to question 1 is : "No".
Conclusion
AcccesLogValve will eventually produce a log entry. At least I haven't been able to produce a scenario where this is not the case.
All the access logs that I have seen are written after the request/response has been processed because it is useful to log info like the size of the response or the total processing time.
"If something goes wrong before that AccessLogValve will not log the request.
Question 1: Is this correctly understood?"
No, not based on my experience. The request/response is always logged, even if there is an error processing it. In that case the HTTP status code field (%s in the log pattern) will contain an error code, like 500.

boolean is set to false by default when passed in SOAP request

Situation : I am coding a web service in which soap client sends the request to web service which will update the database.
Suppose, there is a table project_team_members and service will be updating info of individual team member.
There is a column in table IS_TEAM_LEADER which can have '0' or '1' as value.
Problem: When updating TL info, if I am not sending IS_TL field from SOUP UI (A SOAP Client), it is automatically received as 'false' by default in java code.
How can i know if user is sending it or not, i mean i am not able to send null in case of boolean data-type from SOAP client
Revisiting my own question after so many years.
Giving response to myself at 2012 :)
One option can be, to send whatever is there in the database as it is, back to the server. But for this prior read call is necessary.
Another option is given by Jesse's(comment under question) as an answer/solution
If there is any field, e.g. Foo, there is often an associated
IsFooSpecified property to determine if the value was set or not. If
there an IsIsTeamLeadSpecified property you can access?
PS: There wasn't any field as suggested by Jesse but this can help someone else.

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