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Status Code Handling with Web.Contents

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The Web.Contents function has some built-in functionality for dealing with certain HTTP status codes. The default behavior can be overridden in your extension using the ManualStatusHandling field in the options record.

Automatic retry

Web.Contents will automatically retry requests that fail with one of the following status codes:

Code Status
408 Request Timeout
429 Too Many Requests
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

Requests will be retried up to three times before failing. The engine uses an exponential back-off algorithm to determine how long to wait until the next retry, unless the response contains a Retry-after header. When the header is found, the engine will wait the specified number of seconds before the next retry. The minimum supported wait time is 0.5 seconds, and the maximum value is 120 seconds.

Note

The Retry-after value must be in the delta-seconds format. The HTTP-date format is currently not supported.

Authentication exceptions

The following status codes will result in a credentials exception, causing an authentication prompt asking the user to provide credentials (or sign in again in the case of an expired OAuth token).

Code Status
401 Unauthorized
403 Forbidden

Note

Extensions are able to use the ManualStatusHandling option with status codes 401 and 403, which is not something that can be done in Web.Contents calls made outside of a custom data connector (that is, directly from Power Query).

Redirection

The following status codes will result in an automatic redirect to the URI specified in the Location header. A missing Location header will result in an error.

Code Status
300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Found
303 See Other
307 Temporary Redirect

Note

Only status code 307 will keep a POST request method. All other redirect status codes will result in a switch to GET.