Responses

Responses are HTTP messages from the server in response to application requests. The response includes header and body parts to the message.

Tip: Using a REST client in your browser is a convenient way to visualize the response header and body.

Response header

A response header contains information similar to the following example:

Status Code:200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:38:49 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Status Code is of particular interest, indicating if the requested succeeded or not. Responses with 200-series status codes indicate the request was handled successfully. Another informative data item in the header is Content-Type, which describes the data format. Currently, only the JSON data format is supported.

Response body

For a GET request, the response body contains the data representing the resource or resource set requested. These data are formatted as specified by the Content-Type property in the header.

The following code snippet shows an example response body returned by the server, in response to a location request (http://myhost/rundb/api/v1/location/?format=json):

{
"meta": {"limit": 20, "next": null, "offset": 0, "previous": null, "total_count": 1},
 "objects":
   [{"comments": "",
         "id": "2",
         "name": "IonWest",
         "resource_uri": "/rundb/api/v1/location/2/"
   }]
}

A response body is not returned by the server for PUT, POST and DELETE requests.