transformResponse runs, even if error code is received

Steps To Reproduce

1. Make an axios request to an endpoint that will return an error code (i.e. 404 or 500.

Expected Result

transformResponse should not run

Actual Result

transformResponse runs, attempting to transform a response that is, i.e.

• empty
• an HTML description of the 404
• etc

the actual error code is not allowed to bubble up to the catch listener

instead we generally get some sort of syntax error (without copious defensive programming techniques)

[calumjames]

Can I ask why you guys use transformResponse ? I was thinking to put the data transformation logic in the transformResponse, but not sure if it is a right place to do so, espcially seeing this issue !

transformResponse is a lovely design pattern for transforming the response in the way the client requires it if the service doesn’t quite do that, or if a specific client needs to do something different with response data compared to another client. Or if we just want the response as a JavaScript object rather than a string. It’s a more pleasant pattern than using interceptors or dealing with each response in a different way.

To keep our code clean and to negate unnecessary and harder-to-maintain defensive programming, it would be great if we can define different transforms for success responses compared to error responses. Perhaps transformResponse could continue to handle both (to ensure no breaking changes) but transformSuccessResponse and transformErrorResponse could be added to help us with this?

[ventralnet]

In my case I need to use transformResponse to convert a string representation of json to actual json. The api call is to a third party so I can’t correct the response coming from the API