- This is Microsoft.
- He returns Webhook success with a code 200 and plaintext 1.
- He returns Webhook failure with a code 200 and a string tells its endpoint returned error 400.
- the string didn’t tell what exactly the error.
- Don’t be like Microsoft.
EDIT: Got a few details wrong since this happens a few months ago and this meme used to be on r/ProgrammerHumor. Also the proof: 
It’s hard when you hit an endpoint that hits another endpoint, because technically the first request IS a 200. No right or wrong way as long as they are consistent and document it clearly imo
Now here is the fun part: they do not have a API documentation; they only have a very generic guide on how to setup webhook API
Microsoft code docs are the literal worst
Lmao, Microsoft code docs are absolutely amazing compared to the undocumented bullshit I have to deal with at most companies that have rolled their own services.
Shit, Microsoft docs are better than most other large companies with broadly used software even, not just random undocumented BS from smaller companies and products. In my experience, Microsoft’s Xamarin docs are somehow often a better guide for Android development than Google’s docs (good god are the official Android docs some of the hottest garbage that a company of Google’s size and talent could put out), and I’ve yet to find a better general reference for any language or library than Microsoft’s .NET documentation. I’ve seen a lot of people dunk on it for it’s verbosity and/or “example bloat” but I love the length of their docs for breaking down different use-cases and giving examples of each, along with potential misuses and recommended alternatives.
That said, they do still have some garbage docs (like what OP is pointing out), but my general experience with their docs, especially for their larger/more mainstream products, has been surprisingly positive.
Right but Microsoft isn’t most companies, it’s a SOFTWARE company. A multibillion dollar one at that. Compared to other even multimillion dollar companies, their docs are fucking atrocious
Not my experience at all. What specific docs are you looking at?
Because the .NET documentation and their Azure documentation are some of the best docs I’ve used and come across. Azure’s doc certainly kick the crap out of GCP and AWS.
Their azure documentation is mostly surface level. They make all those docs like they’re talking to a user not a dev. They’re limited AF when you’re actually trying to deploy an app via a ci/cd pipeline
Microsoft365 docks have several articles that are fully depreciated and there is no disclaimer at the top about switching to new security standards or anything like that.
That’s just off the top of my head, but there have been plenty more I’ve had the displeasure of using
Their azure documentation is mostly surface level. They make all those docs like they’re talking to a user not a dev. They’re limited AF when you’re actually trying to deploy an app via a ci/cd pipeline
Deploy to what? I’ve had no issues deploying to App Service from both Github actions and Azure pipelines and azure functions / static web apps were even easier.
Microsoft docs in general are the worst. Can’t tell you how many fucking dead links and straight up incorrect information I’ve come across on their official help articles
Or deprecated documentation that has no indicator whatsoever that it’s out of date
I see you’ve never dealt with chip vendors
Thankfully not
I my experience you then send a different error code to help developers know that right away. Really if there is nothing the developer could do it should be a 500 server error. The server did in fact error.
If the developer should have done something different then translate it to an appropriate code, 400 bad request or something
In this case I like to return a 502.
Great time to implement a 7XX code: https://github.com/joho/7XX-rfc
739 might be a good one
Nice! I’m definitely going to implement 787 at work.
X-Forwarded?
Can / should you use it for anything other than IPs?
Well, if its acting as a proxy, then the status code should be transmitted intact right?
It’s not really a proxy, it’s just making another request as part of its request
After working few years on a complex web application, I am starting to feel this style. Doing RESTful APIs for anything else than dead simple CRUD is pain.
It’s similar to how I now often avoid throwing errors in my code, and instead return a ‘results’ object that could potentially have an error or a success. It often forces you to test and think about the non happy path more thoroughly.
Exceptions actually have a huge performance hit, you should only use them in a HALT EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY situations and never in anything that could be called repeatedly. We have refactored few of those to be 10-100 times faster by just returning success: false instead of throwing and catching exceptions.
Working with Microsoft’s APIs is akin to trying to navigate a maze of barbed wire with a blindfold on
Or when you hit an API and the error message comes back as html instead of json.
Failed successfully.
The quality of Microsoft APIs is legendary… if you just take a minute to study win32, you will be always glad that those webserver responses are the kind of shit you have to deal with.
But to be fair, this looks exactly like a well designed API that somebody pushed behind a corporate firewall.
Wait til you hear about graphql…
What don’t you like about graphql error handling? Whenever I’ve made a graphql api, I use the default errors as unhandled/system errors and payloads return handled error types.
It’s a bit more boilerplate to wire up, but I find it smooth to build and use
Just making a point that it always returns a 200 even when it errors.
Fair point, that it does
Yup I’m with you. Once the boilerplate is in place, smooth sailing from there. What OP is showing truly is the worst though lol.
Yes, but actually no.
Yeah, that’s a pain. I’m probably lucky to only have experienced this once.
Wait, do you know if this still happens?
I have a ticket in our backlog to investigate similar issue with Teams Webhook reporting success but not posting anything.
None of us wanted to look at it so been in our backlog for a whilr
Yep, this still happens
There’s a video somewhere by someone… Returning a blank document instead of an error code is sometimes a QoS decision. Clients won’t make a new request without the user intervention, so whatever resource that’s bottlenecked has time to catch up
Since it’s been months, I haven’t checked… Will possibly take a look later
Yeah, typical on .net too. I just have a middleware and turn it into proper REST. Though all the error messages are usually like ‘something went wrong’.
Sometimes it is because some monitoring tools are set to generate alert on certain frequency of 4xx / 5xx errors
nice plain text response 🤦
