Deleting a project is breaking client because of empty body in response

[mertarmagan]

Goal

We want to delete some of the projects periodically using this interface with version v1.8.0 .

Problem

We did some tests on the stage server but the DELETE /projects implementation sw360.project.ProjectMixin.delete_project() raises JSONDecodeError each time we try to delete a project although the response is 200 OK and the project is actually deleted.

As we understand the response from server does not contain a body (also tested with Postman) and the response.json() tries to decode as it is written here.

Proposal

Improvement in the if clauses might solve the problem, simply returning True rather than response.json() if response is 200 OK might solve the issue. Similar approach was also followed here in L383.

What are your thoughts on this? Thanks in advance.

/cc @t-graf @gernot-h

[tngraf]

Hi @mertarmagan,
thanks for reporting. I can confirm for SW360 18.0.0-SNAPSHOT of 2024-12-20.
Unfortunately there is no consistent behavior in the REST API. Sometimes there is data returned, sometimes not and sometime this changes over the time...

[mertarmagan]

Thanks for the quick response, it is sad to hear that REST API is acting inconsistent over time, a fix on the REST API side could be to return 204 No Content to tell there is no response body rather than returning 200 OK without a body. I may create another issue there explaining this.

[tngraf]

Fixed: there is now a check whether the response has some content. Only in this case it is tried to convert this to JSON.
Your suggestions to change the return type to boolean would have been a breaking API change.
Forcing the python library to return 204 would be inconsistent when the REST API endpoint does not return such HTTP code.
From the beginning our idea was to have a rather thin wrapper around the REST API.