Responses with no body

[bloudermilk]

This started off as a question on Github (sorry about that) where @dblock pointed out that an empty response body is not valid JSON. This leads me to a more design-related question that is: Should my API be returning empty response bodies? If 95% of my endpoints return JSON bodies but a couple endpoints (for example, DELETE requests) return no body and the content type text/plain, is this bad design?

Any input is appreciated.

[Robert Ross]

The standard for a delete request is to return a 200 OK with an empty response body if I remember correctly.

As for the content type, not sure on that one. I would imagine keeping it application/json would be the most consistent approach.

Sent from my iPhone

[Daniel Doubrovkine]

In my experience with the real world I often found that I wanted the DELETE to return the destroyed object. It made code that provides messages like "XYZ has been deleted" much simpler - no need to keep some model around. 

Other than that, there's a fundamental question here. Is an empty string valid JSON? If we think it is, we should probably handle "" and nil in Grape differently than we do now.

--

dB. | Moscow - Geneva - Seattle - New York
dblock.org - @dblockdotorg

[Robert Ross]

I think it is. Why not return {}  ?

[Daniel Doubrovkine]

True. That's an empty JSON, but not an empty body though. An empty body would have a content length of zero.

A possible implementation could be something like `empty!` or `terminate!` (can't think of a good name) that would raise an exception that, once caught, produces a body with content-length 0.

[Andrew Cove]

Did anything ever come of this?

I'm tracking down a single endpoint that is turning a 'text/plain' nil response into "null" as the body. Is there a better approach?

[Rob Hunter]

I came across a similar need a while back.

If I remember the HTTP RFC correctly, it's appropriate for a response without a body to have no Content-Type header at all.

There are a few situations that need an empty response. Definitely HEAD requests, but also
204 No Content and some others.

I've got some time this weekend, so I'll look at putting together a pull request.

-Hunter

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