What should a JSON service return on failure / error

Question

I'm writing a JSON service in C# (.ashx file). On a successful request to the service I return some JSON data. If the request fails, either because an exception was thrown (e.g. database timeout) or because the request was wrong in some way (e.g. an ID that doesn't exist in the database was given as an argument) how should the service respond? What HTTP status codes are sensible, and should I return any data, if any?

I'm anticipating that service will mainly be called from jQuery using the jQuery.form plugin, does jQuery or this plugin have any default way of handling an error response?

EDIT: I've decided I'll use jQuery + .ashx + HTTP [status codes] on success I'll return JSON but on error I'll return a string, as it appears that that is what the error option for jQuery.ajax expects.

Answer 1

See this question for some insight into best-practices for your situation.

The topline suggestion (from said link) is to standardize a response structure (for both success and failure) that your handler looks for, catching all Exceptions at the server layer and converting them to the same structure. For example (from this answer):

{
    success:false,
    general_message:"You have reached your max number of Foos for the day",
    errors: {
        last_name:"This field is required",
        mrn:"Either SSN or MRN must be entered",
        zipcode:"996852 is not in Bernalillo county. Only Bernalillo residents are eligible"
    }
} 

This is the approach stackoverflow uses (in case you were wondering how others do this kind of thing); write operations like voting have "Success" and "Message" fields, regardless of if the vote was allowed or not:

{ Success:true, NewScore:1, Message:"", LastVoteTypeId:3 }

As @Phil.H pointed out, you should be consistent in whatever you choose. This is easier said than done (as is everything in development!).

For example, if you submit comments too quickly on SO, instead of being consistent and returning

{ Success: false, Message: "Can only comment once every blah..." }

SO will throw a server exception (HTTP 500) and catch it in their error callback.

As much as it "feels right" to use jQuery + .ashx + HTTP [status codes] IMO it will add more complexity to your client-side code base than it's worth. Realize that jQuery does not "detect" error codes but rather the lack of a success code. This is an important distinction when trying to design a client around http response codes with jQuery. You only get two choices (was it a "success" or "error"?), which you have to branch further on your own. If you have a small number of WebServices driving a small number of pages then it might be okay, but anything larger scale may get messy.

It's much more natural in a .asmx WebService (or WCF for that matter) to return a custom object than to customize the HTTP status code. Plus you get the JSON serialization for free.