JSON RPC Error Codes Improvement Proposal

Contents

• JSON RPC Standard errors
• Custom error codes:
  • Custom error fields
• Possible future error codes?

To help developers add proper error handling in the dapp side, we need to implement custom error codes for the returned JSON RPC errors.

JSON RPC Standard errors

Code	Possible Return message	Description
-32700	Parse error	Invalid JSON was received by the server. An error occurred on the server while parsing the JSON text.
-32600	Invalid Request	The JSON sent is not a valid Request object.
-32601	Method not found	The method does not exist / is not available.
-32602	Invalid params	Invalid method parameter(s).
-32603	Internal error	Internal JSON-RPC error.
-32000 to -32099	Server error. Reserved for implementation-defined server-errors.

Custom error codes:

Code	Possible Return message	Description
1	Unauthorized	Should be used when some action is not authorized, e.g. sending from a locked account.
2	Action not allowed	Should be used when some action is not allowed, e.g. preventing an action, while another depending action is processing on, like sending again when a confirmation popup is shown to the user (?).
3	Execution error	Will contain a subset of custom errors in the data field. See below.

Custom error fields

Custom error 3 can contain custom error(s) to further explain what went wrong. They will be contained in the data field of the RPC error message as follows:

{
    code: 3,
    message: 'Execution error',
    data: [{
        code: 102,
        message: 'Insufficient gas'
    },
    {
        code: 103,
        message: 'Gas limit exceeded'
    }]
}

Code	Possible Return message	Description
100	X doesn't exist	Should be used when something which should be there is not found. (Doesn't apply to eth_getTransactionBy* and eth_getBlock*. They return a success with value null)
101	Requires ether	Should be used for actions which require something else, e.g. gas or a value.
102	Gas too low	Should be used when a to low value of gas was given.
103	Gas limit exceeded	Should be used when a limit is exceeded, e.g. for the gas limit in a block.
104	Rejected	Should be used when an action was rejected, e.g. because of its content (too long contract code, containing wrong characters ?, should differ from -32602 - Invalid params).
105	Ether too low	Should be used when a to low value of Ether was given.

Possible future error codes?

Code	Possible Return message	Description
106	Timeout	Should be used when an action timed out.
107	Conflict	Should be used when an action conflicts with another (ongoing?) action.