Error reporting when site is down

[mitchcohen]

The cwmars site is currently down for maintenance, which is fine. The web site reports an appropriate message, but the iOS app gives a generic "response not JSON" error for any action.

The responses appear to be 404's (not found). Ideally these would be 503's (Service Unavailable), and/or return JSON for JSON requests.

Attached is the HTML response from a desktop Safari session (zipped), and two iPhone screenshots. I'm assuming the server is returning 404 with HTML for JSON requests when this occurs, but I did not verify. One option is to catch 404's, and if the 404 contains HTML, display that in a web view.

CW Mars down for maintainance 404.html.zip

[kenstir]

I am aware of this issue but it hasn't received focussed attention. First, there are 8 or 9 library systems using Hemlock, and I don't know that they all do maintenance the same way. Second, this maintenance occurs usually once a year, so it is not frequent.

I don't see how the web results would be useful; the app does everything through the OSRF gateway. I definitely don't like the idea of embedding a browser for this once a year occurrence.