AFNetworking incorrectly interpreted WP_Error error - objective-c

Question

I have client code that communicates with the server to create an account. The communication works, but the error response is not received correctly. In the Objective-C code below, I use AFNetworking to send the request. I purposely sent an invalid email address and expected the failure block to get executed, but my code kept going into the success block.
- (void)createAccount:(NSString *)email
andUsername:(NSString *)username
andPassword:(NSString *)password
success:(SuccessBlock)success
failure:(FailureBlock)failure
{
NSDictionary *params = #{
#"email": email,
#"username" : username,
#"password" : password,
#"client_id" : #"12345"
#"client_secret" : #"abcdef"
};
NSString *requestUrl = [self pathForEndpoint:#"users/new"
withVersion:ServiceRemoteRESTApibbPressExtVersion_1_0];
[self.api POST:requestUrl parameters:params
success:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, id responseObject) {
success(responseObject); // WENT IN THIS PATH
}
failure:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, NSError *error){
failure(error); // EXPECTS THIS PATH
}
];
}
On the server side, my PHP scripts is coded as follow. I did check the debug.log and saw the printed message: *** users_new_REST_API() email invalid
add_action( 'rest_api_init', function () {
register_rest_route( 'bbpress_ext/v1', '/users/new', array(
'methods' => 'POST',
'callback' => 'users_new_REST_API'
) );
} );
public function users_new_REST_API( $request ) {
$user_name = $request['username'];
$password = $request['password'];
$user_email = $request['email'];
$client_id = $request['client_id'];
$client_secret = $request['client_secret'];
if ( ! is_email( $user_email ) ) {
error_log('*** users_new_REST_API() email invalid');
return new WP_Error('email_invalid', 'Invalid email entered.', array( 'status' => 524) );
}
}
I can't tell if AFNetworking is misbehaving or the REST-API (beta version 2) for Wordpress is broken.

Answer 1

Your understanding of AFNetworking error handling is incomplete. The error handler is for networking errors. It doesn't trigger for HTTP error codes. That's up to your app to decipher and handle. So, whether WP_Error returns a non-2XX HTTP status, or it just returns some kind of JSON object with some error information, AFNetworking is going to report the request succeeded.
It's not the job of AFNetworking to deal with app-level protocol logic.