Generating Open API Usage Rule from Error Descriptions

Open API platform is a trend for many leading social networks and e-business internet enterprises to publish services. The third-party developers can build their own applications interacting with Open platform via the Open API. The APIs have rules on the acceptable value of parameters. However, these rules are often not documented formally or explicitly. Developers may not realize these rules until error is exposed in the runtime. The application will experience robustness problem due to these unhandled errors. Developers using Open API can only handle these errors in a trial-and-error manner when API invocation returning error messages. In this paper, we present an approach to generate Open API usage rules from the error description. It can generate useful API usage rules related to the parameters if the Open API platforms have detailed error descriptions in their documentations. These rules help developers to be aware of the potential error-leading API usage in the development stage of the Open API based applications.