Error # 9 – "Waiter There's a Fly in My Soup"

Like an old cheese board, API data problems can be rich, varied, and smelly. This can include:

• Content-length mismatched to actual content length causing connections to be prematurely closed and invalid data returned/parsed

• Unexpected gzip content because of missing Content-Type in the response header

• Unstructured response data or different structures from similar endpoints

• Putting an auth token in the wrong place (header -v- URL -v- payload)

Unfortunately, these and many others can cause developer frustration, with lengthy attempts to validate data using suspect coding hacks and poor workarounds.

Tools play an important role in resolving data issues – ranging from the simple to the hair-pulling variety. This can include simple assertions for JSON and XML, header and response body validation, but extending to support more complex API use-cases, such as chained-requests and dynamic data insertion (e.g. IDs and timestamps into requests).