I'm building a Node.js application on the express.js framework with CouchDB as a database. I'm utilizing CouchDB's session api for maintaining session state, and various databases for different sections of data.
On essentially every request my application code makes a request to Couch and then if there's an error (with Node) I can respond appropriately, by logging the error and redirecting to a 404 page or something like that. But if I get a CouchDB error, Node wouldn't consider it an error, it would consider that data. Now that's totally fine with me as long as CouchDB can only return this format:
{
"error": "illegal_database_name",
"reason": "Only lowercase characters (a-z), digits (0-9), and any of the characters _, $, (, ), +, -, and / are allowed. Must begin with a letter."
}
A JSON doc with two properties, error and reason. That's fine I can parse it and return the appropriate message; quite gracefully actually.
BUT! Is that all I can expect from CouchDB, or is there another way Couch might fail, that wouldn't yield a JSON doc with those two fields (properties)?
dscape's information of relying on the response codes is correct, and in most situations you will get an object with error and reason. The bulk-document errors are the only place I can think of where neither of these will be true. If just one document fails then you'll still get a 200, but you'll get the error/reason within the array element corresponding to the document that failed. See the docs for more info on that.