In a new post to his site Rob Allen shows you how he adapted a package of his own to work with a Slim framework based API to render "ApiProblem" types correctly (according to this specification).

In the API I'm currently building, I'm rendering errors using RFC 7807: Problem Details for HTTP APIs. As this is a Slim Framework project, it uses PSR-7, so I updated rka-content-type-renderer to support problem.

RFC 7807 defines a standard for sending details of an error in an HTTP response message. It supports both XML and JSON formats.

He starts with an example of the "Problem" response format that includes data for the type of error, details and links to other related objects. He points out this package from Larry Garfield that handles the actual output of the respose format but Rob needed a way to shift between JSON and XML formats too. This is where his updates to his package came in, changing it to include a ApiProblemRenderer that reads the "Accept" header of the incoming request and correctly formats the results accordingly.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the second part of his series looking at creating RESTful APIs with the Zend Framework v2. In the previous post he covered some of the basics of data and structure. In this new article he looks at content types, status codes and two ways to represent them back to your users.

In my last post, I covered some background on REST and the Richardson Maturity Model, and some emerging standards around hypermedia APIs in JSON; in particular, I outlined aspects of Hypermedia Application Language (HAL), and how it can be used to define a generic structure for JSON resources. In this post, I cover an aspect of RESTful APIs that's often overlooked: reporting problems.

He starts with some of the things around error handling and APIs that bother him and why just returning a status code representing an error isn't enough. He suggests two possible solutions to this issue - two messaging formats, API-Problem and vnd.error. He gives brief summaries of each and includes example output to give them some context.