OIC: Making a REST Integration Returning a 404 instead of 500

In this article I describe how to return a HTTP 404 (resource) Not Found with a REST integration that on its turn calls another REST service that returns a 404.

 

This article is superseded by my article Fault Handling in OIC, which gives you the proper way to do this.

When an integration invokes the GET action on a REST service that returns a 404, the integration will raise an APIInvocationError. As a result, the integration on its turn will respond with a HTTP 500 error, which is typically not what you want.

Embedding the invoke in a Scope gives you the option to add a Fault Handler:

Chosing the APIInvocationError gives you the option to configure how any APIInvocationError should be handled. As you can see below, I have configured it to use a Switch, where the top flow will make it return a 404:

In all honesty this is not watertight, because I filter on all APIInvocationErrors where the type is empty (“”). The reason being that all the elements, type, title, detail and errorCode are empty, so I cannot filter on anything.

As I found out, you will also run into this situation when the URL of the Connection used for the invoke is wrong, and probably a few other situations as well. I rely on the assumption that my integration is properly configured, so that the most likely cause of an APIInvocationError indeed is that it concerns a 404.

To make my integration return a 404, I map this as a hard-coded value to the errorCode:

Except for the errorCode I have hard-coded the other elements as well. Probably not exactly according to the specifications, but good and especially clear enough for me:

In the meantime, in the background there is a SOAP fault with a reason containing the HTTP 404, so at some point I hope this will be exposed so that I can filter in a reliable way: