CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Another standard I'd like to propose for the API: When doing a get/search op, 0 results should never be an error. If the search fails because you left out required parameters or the code generated some exception, then that should return an error. But 0 results is a successful get/search (I would argue even if you passed in a specific id), it just didn't find anything matching the criteria you gave it. That shouldn't trigger the API client's error handling mechanism, it should just trigger whatever code logic is in place to handle 0 results (such as never going through a loop, for example).

Does anyone disagree?

I'm going to add this to the new API standard wiki page (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/API+Conventions) for now, but if someone makes a compelling argument against it, it can be changed.