Contents

Pinpointing the Location of Errors

Locate the specific source of the error.

Overview

Some errors are produced by a specific element of the request. In that case, the ErrorResponse includes source.parameter or source.pointer values to indicate the exact location of the error. When the location of the error cannot be determined, the error response does not include those parameters. In some cases, the JSON pointer may indicate an element that isn’t in the request entity, but should be.

Use the Error Response to Pinpoint Parameter Errors

When an error occurs due to a problem with a parameter, the source property contains source.parameter, whose value contains the parameter with the error.

``For example, in this request, the “emaill” query parameter is misspelled:

GET /v1/betaTesters?filter[emaill]=kate-bell%22mac.com

The API responds with an error that includes source.parameter:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
{
    "errors": [
        {
            "status": "400",
            "id": "5becf2db-2f12-4d6a-9dc2-6ceb33c683b4",
            "title": "A parameter has an invalid value",
            "detail": "'emaill' is not a valid filter type",
            "code": "PARAMETER_ERROR.INVALID",
            "source": {
                "parameter": "filter[emaill]"
             }
        }
    ]
}

The source.parameter value indicates that the error is located in the filter[emaill] parameter.

Use the Error Response to Pinpoint Entity Errors

When an error occurs due to a problem with an entity, the source property contains a JSON pointer that describes the place in the request entity where the error originates. In some cases, this pointer may indicate an element that is not in the request entity but should be.

For more information about JSON pointers, see the RFC 6901 proposed standards document.

See Also

Handling Errors