[Developers] minor change in search api behavior (empty result set will no longer be an error)

[Warren Harris]

On Jul 18, 2008, at 2:25 PM, David Flanagan wrote:

> Warren Harris wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 17, 2008, at 4:10 PM, David Flanagan wrote:
>>
>>> It occurs to me that this is a case where it might be useful to  
>>> return a
>>> code /api/status/ok/empty.  It still indicates success, but allows  
>>> it to
>>> be special-cased, when desired.
>>
>> -1
>>
>> I realize that we may have told developers to look for a prefix  
>> matching
>> "/api/status/ok", but chances are they're not going to do this, and  
>> end
>> up with buggy code as a result.
>
> Since this is a case where we're changing from an error code to a
> non-error code, any developer that tests using strict equality will  
> just
> see an error in this case, which is what they were seeing already.  So
> it is not like this will break lots of existing code...
>
> My point, I guess, is that if there is a worry, even in this case,  
> that
> too many developers already do strict equality tests rather than  
> prefix
> tests, then I can't imagine it will ever be acceptable to return an
> extended ok code.  And we ought to just give up and document that it  
> is
> okay to do a strict equality test on the status code!  It would
> certainly simplify everyone's error testing code to be able to use ==
> instead of indexOf or a regular expression match!

It sure would. What are the other documented cases where developers  
have to use a prefix comparison for success?

(Looking through the code, I only see this done for login/logout, but  
maybe that's outside the scope of mql.)

Warren

>
>
> 	David
>
>
>> The bottom line is that returning no results (empty list) is not an
>> error. I'd even vote for striking the message from the result.
>>
>> Warren
>>
>>
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