Nested error reporting in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Nested Error Reporting in REST API

📖 Scenario: You are building a REST API that receives user data. Sometimes, the data has errors inside nested parts, like an address inside a user profile. You want to collect all errors, including those inside nested data, and send them back in a clear way.

🎯 Goal: Create a Python dictionary that represents nested error messages for a user profile API. Then, write code to extract and display these nested errors clearly.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a nested dictionary called errors with specific error messages

Create a variable error_count to count total errors

Use a nested for loop to count all errors inside the nested dictionary

Print the total number of errors found

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs often receive complex data with nested parts. Reporting all errors clearly helps users fix their input quickly.

💼 Career

Backend developers and API designers need to handle nested error reporting to improve user experience and debugging.

1

Create nested error dictionary

Create a dictionary called errors with these exact entries: 'username': 'Required field', 'email': 'Invalid format', and a nested dictionary 'address' with 'street': 'Missing' and 'zipcode': 'Invalid'.

Rest API

# Create the nested dictionary called errors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys 'username', 'email', and 'address'. The 'address' key holds another dictionary.

2

Add error count variable

Create a variable called error_count and set it to 0 to start counting errors.

Rest API

errors = {
    'username': 'Required field',
    'email': 'Invalid format',
    'address': {
        'street': 'Missing',
        'zipcode': 'Invalid'
    }
}

# Create error_count variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named error_count and set it to zero.

3

Count all errors including nested

Use a for loop with variables field and error to iterate over errors.items(). Inside the loop, check if error is a dictionary. If yes, use another for loop with subfield and suberror to iterate over error.items() and increment error_count by 1 for each nested error. Otherwise, increment error_count by 1 for the top-level error.

Rest API

errors = {
    'username': 'Required field',
    'email': 'Invalid format',
    'address': {
        'street': 'Missing',
        'zipcode': 'Invalid'
    }
}

error_count = 0

# Count errors including nested ones
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use isinstance(error, dict) to check if the error is nested. Then loop inside it.

4

Print total error count

Write a print statement to display the text 'Total errors:' followed by the value of error_count.

Rest API

errors = {
    'username': 'Required field',
    'email': 'Invalid format',
    'address': {
        'street': 'Missing',
        'zipcode': 'Invalid'
    }
}

error_count = 0

for field, error in errors.items():
    if isinstance(error, dict):
        for subfield, suberror in error.items():
            error_count += 1
    else:
        error_count += 1

# Print the total number of errors
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an f-string to print the message and the error_count variable.