It is up to API designers to decide which format best suits their use case. That being said, it is good practice to settle on a common response envelope format. With this approach, a RESTful web service provides a uniform interface, enabling the client developers to handle responses in a consistent manner, regardless of the operation being invoked.
The next section offers a sample envelope format.
The first piece of information that is relevant to any operation is whether it was successful. We can encapsulate that information with a status. Secondly, most requests will return data. Therefore, a field in our envelope could provide generic access to the response payload. The following format will form the base of any responses returned by the API:
{
"status": "OK",
"data": {…}
}With this response format, we ensured that client developers will have a consistent way to check if a request was successful and access the payload.