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I have a REST request for my Angular application to use that checks for the existence of an object in the data base. It returns a HTTP response code of 200(OK) or 404(Not Found) depending on whether the object is there.

This is consistent with most of the advice in this SO article (closed many years ago).

However the problem is that the Angular framework and/or the browser's developer tools report the 404 code as an abnormal error condition. Red letters everywhere (console and network log) even though the app is doing just what I want it to. For example the following will show in the Chrome console:

:8080/app/check/abcdef:1 GET http://localhost:8080/app/auth/check/abcdef 404 (Not Found)

I might be naive but I want my application to run with a clean console unless it is actually failing in some way. Am I misusing the 404 response code and should I be implementing an application-specific response via the 200 code?

Keep in mind I eventually want to document my interface and have other applications besides my SPA using it.

AlanObject
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Imo nothing's changed. APIs should still return 404 for non-existing resources. Catch the error in your observable and show the user an appropriate message. Caught errors will also not show in console, network-tab only.

funkizer
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