From the jsonapi documentation:

Error objects provide additional information about problems encountered while performing an operation. Error objects MUST be returned as an array keyed by errors in the top level of a JSON API document.

To return jsonapi compatible error objects in flask-rest-jsonapi, one must raise an exception and an appropriate error message will be shown depending on the type of exception specified.

Following is an example of how to raise a jsonapi compatible error

try:
               self.session.query(Person).filter_by(id=view_kwargs['id']).one()
           except NoResultFound:
               raise ObjectNotFound({'parameter': 'id'}, "Person: {} not found".format(view_kwargs['id']))

But the above method of raising an exception fails when working with decorators in flask-rest-jsonapi. Taking inspiration from the JsonApiException class of flask-rest-jsonapi itself, we’ll be building a custom class which can formulate jsonapi compatible error message and we can just simply return them by using make_response from flask.

In our basic class definition, we’ll define a default title and status code in case none of them is provided by the user. The default status code will be 500. Following is the code for the same:

class ErrorResponse:
   """
   Parent ErrorResponse class for handling json-api compliant errors.
   Inspired by the JsonApiException class of `flask-rest-jsonapi` itself
   """
   title = 'Unknown error'
   status = 500
   headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/vnd.api+json'}

We will be accepting the following four parameters for the initialization of an object of the said class:

• source: the source of the error in the request document
• detail: Any details about the error
• title: Title for the error
• Status: HTTP status for the error

Following is the initialisation function for the same:

def __init__(self, source, detail, title=None, status=None):
       """Initialize a jsonapi ErrorResponse Object

       :param dict source: the source of the error
       :param str detail: the detail of the error
       """
       self.source = source
       self.detail = detail
       if title is not None:
           self.title = title
       if status is not None:
           self.status = status

We’ll be using the jsonapi_errors module to format all of these parameters into jsonapi error objects:

  def respond(self):
       """
       :return: a jsonapi compliant response object
       """
       dict_ = self.to_dict()
       return make_response(json.dumps(jsonapi_errors([dict_])), self.status, self.headers)

Related links:

• Jsonapi error objects: http://jsonapi.org/format/#error-objects
• HTTP status code 500: httpstatuses.com/500
• Flask make response: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.12/api/#flask.make_response