What's an appropriate HTTP status code to return by a REST API service for a validation failure?

Posted by michaeljoseph on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by michaeljoseph
Published on 2009-12-24T22:34:52Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 23:21 UTC
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Filed under:

restful

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validation

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http-status-codes

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python

I'm currently returning 401 Unauthorized whenever I encounter a validation failure in my Django/Piston based REST API application. Having had a look at the HTTP Status Code Registry I'm not convinced that this is an appropriate code for a validation failure, what do y'all recommend?

400 Bad Request
401 Unauthorized
403 Forbidden
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable
412 Precondition Failed
417 Expectation Failed
422 Unprocessable Entity
424 Failed Dependency

Update: "Validation failure" above means an application level data validation failure ie. incorrectly specified datetime, bogus email address etc.

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