和大多数事情一样，“视情况而定”。但对我来说，您的做法并不坏，并且没有违背HTTP规范本身。但是，让我们弄清楚一些事情。

首先，URI应该是不透明的。即使它们对人来说是不透明的，对机器来说也是不透明的。换句话说，http://mywebsite/api/user/13和http://mywebsite/restapi/user/13之间的差异与http://mywebsite/api/user/13和http://mywebsite/api/user/14之间的差异相同，即不相同的不是同一时期。因此，404完全适合http://mywebsite/api/user/14(如果没有这样的用户)，但不一定是唯一合适的响应。

You could also return an empty 200 response or more explicitly a 204 (No Content) response. This would convey something else to the client. It would imply that the resource identified by http://mywebsite/api/user/14 has no content or is essentially nothing. It does mean that there is such a resource. However, it does not necessarily mean that you are claiming there is some user persisted in a data store with id 14. That's your private concern, not the concern of the client making the request. So, if it makes sense to model your resources that way, go ahead.

There are some security implications to giving your clients information that would make it easier for them to guess legitimate URI's. Returning a 200 on misses instead of a 404 may give the client a clue that at least the http://mywebsite/api/user part is correct. A malicious client could just keep trying different integers. But to me, a malicious client would be able to guess the http://mywebsite/api/user part anyway. A better remedy would be to use UUID's. i.e. http://mywebsite/api/user/3dd5b770-79ea-11e1-b0c4-0800200c9a66 is better than http://mywebsite/api/user/14. Doing that, you could use your technique of returning 200's without giving much away.

这是一个非常老的帖子，但我也面临着类似的问题，我想与你们分享我的经验。

我正在用rest api构建微服务架构。我有一些rest GET服务，他们根据请求参数从后端系统收集数据。

我遵循其余的API设计文档，当没有符合查询条件的数据(例如零记录被选中)时，我向客户端发送了带有完美JSON错误消息的HTTP 404。

当没有数据要发送回客户端时，我准备了一个完美的JSON消息，包含内部错误代码等，以通知客户端“未找到”的原因，并将其与HTTP 404一起发送回客户端。这很好。

后来我创建了一个rest API客户端类，这是一个容易隐藏HTTP通信相关代码的助手，当我从我的代码调用我的rest API时，我一直使用这个助手。

但我需要编写令人困惑的额外代码，因为HTTP 404有两个不同的功能:

当rest API在给定的url中不可用时，真正的HTTP 404将由运行rest API应用程序的应用服务器或web服务器抛出 当数据库中没有数据时，客户端根据查询的where条件返回HTTP 404。

重要:我的rest API错误处理程序捕获后端服务中出现的所有异常，这意味着在任何错误的情况下，我的rest API总是返回一个带有消息详细信息的完美JSON消息。

这是我的客户端助手方法的第一个版本，它处理两个不同的HTTP 404响应:

public static String getSomething(final String uuid) {
    String serviceUrl = getServiceUrl();
    String path = "user/" + , uuid);
    String requestUrl = serviceUrl + path;
    String httpMethod = "GET";

    Response response = client
            .target(serviceUrl)
            .path(path)
            .request(ExtendedMediaType.APPLICATION_UTF8)
            .get();

    if (response.getStatus() == Response.Status.OK.getStatusCode()) {
        // HTTP 200
        return response.readEntity(String.class);
    } else {
        // confusing code comes here just because
        // I need to decide the type of HTTP 404...

        // trying to parse response body
        try {
            String responseBody = response.readEntity(String.class);
            ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
            ErrorInfo errorInfo = mapper.readValue(responseBody, ErrorInfo.class);

            // re-throw the original exception
            throw new MyException(errorInfo);

        } catch (IOException e) {
            // this is a real HTTP 404
            throw new ServiceUnavailableError(response, requestUrl, httpMethod);
        }

    // this exception will never be thrown
    throw new Exception("UNEXPECTED ERRORS, BETTER IF YOU DO NOT SEE IT IN THE LOG");
}

但是，因为我的Java或JavaScript客户端可以接收两种类型的HTTP 404，我需要以某种方式检查响应的主体，以防HTTP 404。如果我可以解析响应体，那么我肯定我得到了一个响应，其中没有数据要发送回客户端。

如果我不能解析响应，这意味着我从web服务器(而不是从其余API应用程序)得到了一个真正的HTTP 404。

这太令人困惑了，客户端应用程序总是需要做额外的解析来检查HTTP 404的真正原因。

说实话，我不喜欢这个解决方案。这是令人困惑的，需要向客户端添加额外的狗屁代码。

因此，在这两个不同的场景中，我决定不使用HTTP 404，而是执行以下操作:

我不再在我的应用程序中使用HTTP 404作为响应HTTP代码。 我将使用HTTP 204 (No Content)而不是HTTP 404。

在这种情况下，客户端代码可以更优雅:

public static String getString(final String processId, final String key) {
    String serviceUrl = getServiceUrl();
    String path = String.format("key/%s", key);
    String requestUrl = serviceUrl + path;
    String httpMethod = "GET";

    log(requestUrl);

    Response response = client
            .target(serviceUrl)
            .path(path)
            .request(ExtendedMediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8)
            .header(CustomHttpHeader.PROCESS_ID, processId)
            .get();

    if (response.getStatus() == Response.Status.OK.getStatusCode()) {
        return response.readEntity(String.class);
    } else {
        String body = response.readEntity(String.class);
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        ErrorInfo errorInfo = mapper.readValue(body, ErrorInfo.class);
        throw new MyException(errorInfo);
    }

    throw new AnyServerError(response, requestUrl, httpMethod);
}

我认为这能更好地解决这个问题。

如果你有更好的解决方案，请与我们分享。

这篇古老但优秀的文章……http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow是这么说的…

404 Not Found——服务太懒惰(或者太安全)了，不能给我们一个请求失败的真实原因，但是不管是什么原因，我们都需要处理它。

由于这个讨论似乎能够在时间结束时幸存下来，我将抛出JSON:API规范

404未找到 服务器在处理获取不存在的单个资源的请求时必须响应404 Not Found，除非请求保证200 OK响应并以null作为主要数据(如上所述)。

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json

{
  "links": {
    "self": "http://example.com/articles/1/author"
  },
  "data": null
}

也请看看这个Stackoverflow问题

所以从本质上讲，听起来答案可能取决于请求是如何形成的。

如果根据对http://mywebsite/restapi/user/13的请求，所请求的资源构成URI的一部分，而用户13不存在，那么404可能是合适的和直观的，因为URI代表不存在的用户/实体/文档等。对于使用GUID http://mywebsite/api/user/3dd5b770-79ea-11e1-b0c4-0800200c9a66和上面的api/restapi参数的更安全的技术，情况也是如此。

However, if the requested resource ID was included in the request header [include your own example], or indeed, in the URI as a parameter, eg http://mywebsite/restapi/user/?UID=13 then the URI would still be correct (because the concept of a USER does exits at http://mywebsite/restapi/user/); and therefore the response could reasonable be expected to be a 200 (with an appropriately verbose message) because the specific user known as 13 does not exist but the URI does. This way we are saying the URI is good, but the request for data has no content.

就我个人而言，200还是感觉不对(尽管我之前也说过)。例如，当发送不正确的ID时，200响应代码(没有详细响应)可能导致不调查问题。

A better approach would be to send a 204 - No Contentresponse. This is compliant with w3c's description *The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation.*1 The confusion, in my opinion is caused by the Wikipedia entry stating 204 No Content - The server successfully processed the request, but is not returning any content. Usually used as a response to a successful delete request. The last sentence is highly debateable. Consider the situation without that sentence and the solution is easy - just send a 204 if the entity does not exist. There is even an argument for returning a 204 instead of a 404, the request has been processed and no content has been returned! Please be aware though, 204's do not allow content in the response body

来源

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes 1. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

统一资源标识符是指向资源的唯一指针。格式较差的URI不指向资源，因此对其执行GET操作将不会返回资源。404表示服务器没有找到任何与请求uri匹配的内容。如果你输入了错误的URI或坏的URI，这就是你的问题，也是你无法访问资源的原因，无论是HTML页面还是IMG。