HTTP Response Codes

The EBSCO Knowledge Services return an HTTP response code with each request. The Knowledge Services use conventional HTTP response codes to indicate success or failure of the request. Response codes in the 400 range indicate an error in the information that was provided in the request. For example, a 404 HTTP response code is returned by the service if the information provided is missing a required parameter. Response codes in the 500 range indicate an error on the server, a database error or an API settings error. The HTTP response codes are below.

Response Codes

Code	Text	Retry	Description
200	OK	Yes	Everything worked as expected.
202	Accepted	Yes	The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed.
204	No Content	Yes	The server has successfully fulfilled the PUT request and there is no additional content to send in the response payload body.
400	Bad Request	No	The request could not be understood by server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat the request without modifications.
403	Forbidden	No	The request is understood but access is not allowed due to the IP whitelisting policy.
404	Not found	No	The URI requested is invalid. Also returned when the requested format is not supported by the requested method.
409	Conflict	Yes	The request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state of the resource.
429	Too Many Requests	Yes	Returned when a request cannot be served due to the application’s rate limit having been exhausted for the resource.
500	Internal Server Error	Yes	Something is broken. Try again later or you may contact the EBSCO customer service team at [email protected].
503	Service Unavailable Exception	Yes	Our servers are up, but overloaded with requests. Try again later or you may contact the EBSCO customer service team at [email protected].
504	Endpoint Request Timed-out Exception	Yes	Our servers are up, but the request couldn’t be serviced due to some failure at our server. Try again later or you may contact the EBSCO customer service team at [email protected].

Error Response Messages

The EBSCO Knowledge Services also return error messages that provide additional information about the error. Error messages are returned in JSON format. The error message contains an error code, a message and a sub code. The error message provides descriptive error text and codes that are machine-parsable. The sub code field is an optional field. The sub code can be used to indicate finer grained details about the error. The message text for an error message could vary, but the error that the code represents will stay the same. An example error message is below.

Error Message

{
  "Errors": [
    {
      "message": "Parameter Offset is missing.",
      "code": 1005,
      "subcode": 0
    }
  ]
}

Error Message Codes

Each error message has an error code. The error code corresponds to a particular HTTP response code. The error codes for the EBSCO Knowledge Services are in the table below. If you see an error code that is not listed in the table, please use the HTTP response code to determine the best way to address the error. Some errors are resolved if you simply retry the same request.

Error Codes

Code	HTTP Code	Text (Sample Error Message)	Description
1001	404	Vendor not found	The specified resource was not found.
1004	500	Internal error has occurred.	An unknown internal error occurred.
1005	400	Missing parameter "count"	Missing required parameter(s).
1006	400	Parameter count is outside the range 1-100	Invalid parameter received
1009	400	Custom package with the provided name already exists	The specified resource already exists
1010	409	Snapshot preparation already in progress	Snapshot preparation already in progress