How can you handle API error codes and messages?

When dealing with API errors, check HTTP status codes (e.g., 200 for success, 4xx for client errors). Refer to API documentation for specifics. Display user-friendly error messages, avoiding exposure of sensitive information. Implement logging for debugging and monitoring. Consider retries for transient errors. Create a standardized error-handling framework for consistency. Keep error handling updated with API changes for reliability.

A YouTube video will help you getting started and how to use that API, but at the end you will get back to the documentations whenever you face a problem or to modify something. In documentations you can check what are the supported programming languages, what methods are available like POST & GET. You can also check more about the Authentication, error messages, and the payload data syntax.

The documentation generally provides a detailed information about the various error codes, their meanings, and suggested actions to resolve them. So, before integrating an API into your application carefully review its documentation. You can refer to MDN web docs, to find more about error codes and their possible cause and how to fix them.

As Steve Jobs emphasized, "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around." Prioritizing clear and informative error handling enhances the overall experience for API consumers. Some of the best practices are: Handle API errors with consistency: use standardized codes, clear messages, and appropriate HTTP status codes. Include an error payload with additional details & maintain a consistent structure. Document error codes thoroughly, log detailed information for debugging. Utilize appropriate HTTP status codes to indicate the nature of response. For example, use 4xx codes for client errors (e.g., 400 Bad Request) and 5xx for server errors (e.g., 500 Internal Server Error).

In addition some errors happens on code level which come as 500, so generally we need to handle them even they are not mentioned on the API documentation, also some other cases we might got errors with 200 status code so we need to aware on reading API documentation. Most of the cases we cannot expect the API to be work 100% so better we dry run the API touching other parts

Beside proper handling of errors inside API logic, I prefer to have some kind of global exception handler which allows applications to recover from unexpected errors and have user friendly response in APIs. When it comes to debugging of those errors, we always should use helpful loggers so that we can analyse the issue later.

Create a global middleware error handler to catch all errors from the controller and send errors with a custom status code and message from the controller and unhandled errors from the catch block.

It is impossible to avoid errors on an API. The proper thinking is, how to handle them. First, we should understand what are the error codes an API can return (1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx). Since we are interested in errors, let's focus on 4xx and 5xx. We should always use defensive programming. What are our traps? Input validation, NPE checks, timeouts, idempotent calls. Most of the errors should be handled properly and relevant status codes should be returned. They will most probably end up in 4xx range (client errors). Some errors cannot be handled, like database is down. They will result in 5xx errors (server errors). Some strategies; - Input validation - Auto retry (against timeouts) - Rate limiting - Fallbacks - Optimistic responses (202)

Use try-catch blocks or equivalent mechanisms in your programming language to manage exceptions, additionally test your application with a variety of inputs, including edge cases and invalid data, to ensure robust error handling. if an API consistently returns errors, implement the circuit breaker pattern to temporarily stop making requests to it.