Java Application exits if calling PokeAPI with invalid argument

Dear Developers,

I am facing a usability problem when using pokekotlin. This is my situation: I am writing a Java application and want to cache all abilities. My first intention was to call getAbility() until I get no more abilities:

        boolean continueLoop = true;
        for (int i = 1; continueLoop; i++) {
            Ability ability = pokeApi.getAbility(i);
            if (ability == null) {
                continueLoop = false;
            }
            else {
                //do somthing
            }
        }

However as soon as i reaches a value PokeAPI returns a 404 for, my application exits with this exception:

Exception in thread “main” me.sargunvohra.lib.pokekotlin.client.ErrorResponse: (404) Not Found at me.sargunvohra.lib.pokekotlin.client.PokeApiClient.result(PokeApiClient.kt:13) at me.sargunvohra.lib.pokekotlin.client.PokeApiClient.getAbility(PokeApiClient.kt:251)

I tried to catch the exception. This didn’t work. My next thought was to use the method getAbilityList(). This is working for me, but to get the actual Ability object I have to extract the id from the NamedApiResource and then do the getAbility() call with this id. This approach works but, I assume, PokeAPI is called twice for every ability. I would prefer not doing so.

I don’t know nothing about kotlin and thus can’t tell if this behaviour is intended or not. Also I have no idea how to prevent my application from exiting.

Wouldn’t it be possible to just return null in case a HTTP call returns no result/404 error?

Regards Adrian

P.S.: Nevertheless you are doing a great job. Kudos to you!

[Kronopt]

I just confirmed that all 293 abilities are reachable.

[sargunv]

We should probably return something more informative than 404 in case of rate limiting

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 16:47 Kronopt [e-mail] wrote:

By running that code you’re just going over the 100 API requests per minute of pokeapi.co (https://pokeapi.co/docs/v2.html#info), as there are 293 abilities.

Please read the documentation. You shouldn’t be scraping the API like that.

As for the error, that’s probably the default error for a 404 http error.

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