How to handle business rules with a REST API?

Posted by Ciprio on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Ciprio
Published on 2014-07-22T09:48:46Z Indexed on 2014/08/25 16:28 UTC
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api

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web-services

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rest

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api-design

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http

I have a REST API to manage a booking system I'm searching how to manage this situation :

A customer can book a time slot : A TimeSlot resource is created and linked to a Person resource. In order to create the link between a time lot and a person, the REST client send a POST request on the TimeSlot resource

But if too many people booked the same slot (let's say the limit is 5 links), it must be impossible to create more associations.

How can I handle this business restriction ? Can I return a 404 status code with a JSON response detailing the error with a status code ?

Is it a RESTFul approach ?

EDIT :

Like suggested below I used status 409 Conflict in addition to a JSON response detailing the error

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