Handling invalid JSON bodies

[franzliedke]

We encountered this in a test case, where we were using Restify for making requests to our Rails app. This app answered with HTTP 400 for certain invalid parameters. However, Rails sometimes sets the Content-Type header even for requests with empty bodies. This header makes Restify interpret the empty body as JSON, which then raises an exception.

Possible solutions:

• Introduce a special case for empty response bodies, no matter the content type.
• Handle any JSON parsing error and ignore the body - this might be a bit surprising, but it's a possible scenario that needs to be handled somehow. 😕

(Yes, the server is doing something wrong here, but more graceful error handling on the client side would probably be useful, too. At least I am not aware of a protocol for handling processing errors in Restify.)

[franzliedke]

Idea from @jgraichen: Ignore all errors when parsing relations, and throw when trying to access the parsed body data.

[franzliedke]

Same problem for the Msgpack processor.