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    Does a 202 make sense in response to a GET, though? That's certainly the correct choice for the initial POST, which is why I'm using it. But it seems semantically suspicious for a GET to say "accepted" when it didn't accept anything from that particular request. Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 18:21
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    @MainMa Like I said, I POST up the job to be queued, then I GET the results, potentially after the client has closed the session. A 404 is something I've considered as well, but it seems wrong, since the request is found, it just hasn't been completed. That would indicate to me that the queued job was not found, which is a very different situation. Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 19:06
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    @MatthewHaugen: when you do the GET part, don't think about it as a incomplete request, but as a request to get the result of the operation. For instance, if I tell you to convert a video and it takes you five minutes to do it, requesting for a converted video two minutes later should result in HTTP 404, because the video is simply not there yet. Requesting for the progress of the operation itself, on the other hand, will probably result in an HTTP 200 containing the number of bytes converted, the speed, etc. Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 19:11
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    HTTP Status Code for Resource not yet available suggests returning a 409 conflict response ("The request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state of the resource. "), rather than a 404 response, in the case that a resource doesn't exist because it is in the middle of being generated. Commented Apr 20, 2016 at 13:22
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    @Maggyero: I think it is a bad idea for three reasons. (1) A resource which completely changes its type depending on some internal state of the system is counter-intuitive. (2) As a caller, when I ask for status, I may want to get back status, not the whole video; I might have a very different processing for videos themselves; maybe even I check for status from one machine/container, and grab the video itself from another one. (3) A video identified by /video/status/123 URI doesn't make sense whatsoever. Commented Jun 24, 2021 at 6:29