consider the following resources
-Year
-Classroom
-Students
I create a new resource with next URIs related to
PUT /years/{year Es: 2108}
PUT /classrooms/{classroom code Es: ls1sa, ls2sa, ls3sa...}
POST /students
A student for a specific year belong to the classroom and the next year, if he studies, will pass to the next classroom.
I'd like to create a new resource associations
year-classroom-students
using the following URI
/years/{yearCode}/classrooms/{classroomCode}/students/{studentsId}
Before save new resource I check for yearCode, classroomCode, and studentId.
Which HTTP status code should I send when one of the previous resource is missing?
Once the invalid values are sent in the URL, which is used to locate a resource in the server, in you could return 404:
6.5.4. 404 Not Found
The 404 (Not Found) status code indicates that the origin server did
not find a current representation for the target resource or is not
willing to disclose that one exists. [...]
On the other hand, if you want to send the parameters in the request payload, you could consider 422 to indicate that the request entity cannot be processed:
11.2. 422 Unprocessable Entity
The 422 (Unprocessable Entity) status code means the server
understands the content type of the request entity (hence a
415 (Unsupported Media Type) status code is inappropriate), and the
syntax of the request entity is correct (thus a 400 (Bad Request)
status code is inappropriate) but was unable to process the contained
instructions. For example, this error condition may occur if an XML
request body contains well-formed (i.e., syntactically correct), but
semantically erroneous, XML instructions.
For both situations, the response payload should contain details about the error. Have a look at the RFC 7807.
