Reactor Errors

Errors that occur when invoking a reactor will be formatted according to the standard Basis Theory Error Response. The contents of each error will vary based on the failure scenario, and there are several standard error codes that are possible that can be used to determine the cause of the error.

Reactor Error Codes

Code	Meaning	Common Scenarios
400	Bad Request	Missing or invalid args on the request Invalid Reactor Configuration
401	Authentication Error	Invalid or unknown credentials Credentials are valid, but lack permission to complete the operation
402	Invalid Payment Method	Expired Card A test card or bank account was used in a production environment, or vice-versa An external API denied the card or bank account
422	Unprocessable Entity	Reactor code is not a valid function
429	Rate Limit Error	An external API responded with a 429 HTTP response code
500	Reactor Runtime Error	An unhandled exception occurred An external API responded with a 5XX HTTP response code External API connection failure

There are a few different root causes for why one of these errors may be returned from a reactor:

1. An error occurred within Basis Theory's reactor execution framework when processing your request. For example, this can occur if the reactor code is invalid and fails to compile (JavaScript code is validated before being executed) resulting in a 422 error, or if the provided args contain an invalid expression resulting in a 400 error.

2. An error occurred within your reactor code. For example, an HTTP call is made to an external API and they responded with an error, or a runtime error occurred within the code due to a bug. The following section details best practices when handling errors within reactor code.

Handling Errors in Reactor Code

The @basis-theory/basistheory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js npm package can be referenced within your reactor code to better control the status codes and messages included on reactor errors.

Error Types

This package includes several error types that can be thrown from your code, including:

Type	Status Code	Detail
AuthenticationError	401	Authentication Failed
AuthorizationError	403	Forbidden
BadRequestError	400	Bad Request
InvalidPaymentMethodError	402	Invalid Payment Method
RateLimitError	429	Rate Limit Exceeded
ReactorRuntimeError	500	Reactor Runtime Error
CustomHttpResponseError	any	N/A

If your reactor code throws any of these standard error types, with the exception of CustomHttpResponseError, they will be caught and translated into a standard Basis Theory error response with the corresponding status code and detail specified in the table above.

If a CustomHttpResponseError is thrown from a reactor, the status code, headers, and body defined by the error will be used to construct a custom API response.

Any other errors raised from reactor code will result in a ReactorRuntimeError containing the original error object and the response will have status code 500.

Error Constructors

Each of the error types, excluding CustomHttpResponseError, accepts a constructor argument that will be returned within the errors block. The constructor argument for each type supports several error formats, for example:

String

// Throwing an error constructed with a string error message:
const { ReactorRuntimeError } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');
throw new ReactorRuntimeError('My error message');

// Would result in the following error response:
{
  "status": 500,
  "detail": "Reactor Runtime Error",
  "errors": {
    "error": ["My error message"]
  }
}

Array

// Throwing an error constructed with an array:
const { ReactorRuntimeError } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');
throw new ReactorRuntimeError(["error 1", "error 2"]);

// Would result in the following error response:
{
  "status": 500,
  "detail": "Reactor Runtime Error",
  "errors": {
    "error": ["error 1", "error 2"]
  }
}

Object

// Throwing an error constructed with an object:
const { ReactorRuntimeError } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');
throw new ReactorRuntimeError({
  error1: 'description 1',
  error2: ['description 2', 'description 3']
});

// Would result in the following error response:
{
  "status": 500,
  "detail": "Reactor Runtime Error",
  "errors": {
    "error1": ["description 1"],
    "error2": ["description 2", "description 3"]
  }
}

Custom Errors

To have complete control over the response body that is returned, including custom status codes, custom headers, or to have complete control over the response body, a CustomHttpResponseError can be thrown from a reactor.

For example, throwing the following error:

const { CustomHttpResponseError } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');
throw new CustomHttpResponseError({
  status: 400,
  headers: {
      "Custom-Response-Header-1": "custom-value-1",
      "Custom-Response-Header-2": "custom-value-2"
  },
  body: {
      "custom_property": "value",
      "custom_object": {
          "custom_nested_property": "value"
      }
  }
});

results in an API response with status code 400 having the headers:

Custom-Response-Header-1: custom-value-1
Custom-Response-Header-2: custom-value-2

and the response body:

{
  "custom_property": "value",
  "custom_object": {
    "custom_nested_property": "value"
  }
}

Best Practices

When integrating with an external API within a reactor, we strongly recommend handling all vendor-specific errors and translating into an appropriate Basis Theory error type.

Some external APIs express error scenarios via HTTP status codes, while others opt to return a generic status code such as 200 OK while expressing the error condition within the response body. Each API is unique and error handling may also look very different when using an SDK vs making a direct HTTP call with a generic HTTP client. For these reasons, error handling logic needs to be customized for each external API call made from within your reactor code.

In order to make it easier to debug errors returned by a reactor, we strongly encourage you to handle all potential errors and to craft your reactor responses such that you have sufficient information available in your system to react appropriately to each error scenario.

Examples

Stripe

module.exports = async function (req) {
  const stripe = require('stripe')(req.configuration.STRIPE_PRIVATE_API_KEY);
  const {
    AuthenticationError,
    BadRequestError,
    InvalidPaymentMethodError,
    RateLimitError,
    ReactorRuntimeError,
  } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');

  try {
    const token = await stripe.tokens.create({
      // redacted for simplicity
    });

    return {
      raw: token,
    };
  } catch (err) {
    // the stripe sdk throws an error containing a type value
    // here we translate from stripe-specific error types into Basis Theory errors
    switch (err.type) {
      case 'StripeCardError':
        throw new InvalidPaymentMethodError();
      case 'StripeRateLimitError':
        throw new RateLimitError();
      case 'StripeAuthenticationError':
        throw new AuthenticationError();
      case 'StripeInvalidRequestError':
        throw new BadRequestError();
      default:
        throw new ReactorRuntimeError(err);
    }
  }
};

Adyen

module.exports = async function (req) {
  const {
    AuthenticationError,
    BadRequestError,
    InvalidPaymentMethodError,
    InvalidReactorConfigurationError,
    RateLimitError,
    ReactorRuntimeError,
  } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');
  const { Client, CheckoutAPI } = require('@adyen/api-library');

  const { ADYEN_API_KEY, ADYEN_MERCHANT_ACCOUNT, ADYEN_ENVIRONMENT } =
    req.configuration;

  const client = new Client({
    apiKey: ADYEN_API_KEY,
    environment: ADYEN_ENVIRONMENT,
  });
  const checkout = new CheckoutAPI(client);

  let res;
  try {
    res = await checkout.payments({
      // redacted for simplicity
    });
  } catch (err) {
    // Adyen's SDK throws an error that may contain an errorCode
    switch (err.errorCode) {
      case '101':
      case '102':
      case '103':
      case '129':
      case '140':
      case '141':
      case '153':
        throw new InvalidPaymentMethodError(err);
      case '159':
        throw new RateLimitError(err);
      case '180':
      case '198':
        throw new BadRequestError(err);
      case '901':
        throw new InvalidReactorConfigurationError(err);
    }

    // or the error may contain a statusCode
    switch (err.statusCode) {
      case 401:
      case 403:
        throw new AuthenticationError(err);
      case 400:
      case 422:
        throw new BadRequestError(err);
      case 429:
        throw new RateLimitError(err);
      default:
        throw new ReactorRuntimeError(err);
    }
  }

  // the API call may have also succeeded and returned an error resultCode
  switch (res.resultCode) {
    case 'Refused':
      throw new InvalidPaymentMethodError(res);
    case 'Error':
      throw new ReactorRuntimeError(res);
    default:
      return {
        raw: res,
      };
  }
};

Spreedly

module.exports = async function (req) {
  const fetch = require('node-fetch');
  const {
    AuthenticationError,
    BadRequestError,
    InvalidPaymentMethodError,
    RateLimitError,
    ReactorRuntimeError,
  } = require('@basis-theory/basis-theory-reactor-formulas-sdk-js');

  const { SPREEDLY_API_ENV_KEY, SPREEDLY_API_ACCESS_KEY } = req.configuration;

  const res = await fetch('https://core.spreedly.com/v1/payment_methods.json', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      Authorization:
        `Basic ` +
        Buffer.from(
          `${SPREEDLY_API_ENV_KEY}:${SPREEDLY_API_ACCESS_KEY}`,
          'binary'
        ).toString('base64'),
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(creationPayload),
  });

  if (res.status !== 201) {
    const response = res.headers
      .get('Content-Type')
      ?.includes('application/json')
      ? await res.json()
      : await res.text();

    // the spreedly api responds with an http status code indicating the error
    // here we translate from a mixture of response status codes and errors in
    // the response body into basis theory errors
    switch (res.status) {
      case 401:
      case 403:
        throw new AuthenticationError(response);
      case 402:
      case 422:
        if (response.errors?.find((e) => e.key.startsWith('errors.metadata')))
          throw new BadRequestError();
        throw new InvalidPaymentMethodError(response);
      case 429:
        throw new RateLimitError(response);
      default:
        throw new ReactorRuntimeError(response);
    }
  }

  return {
    raw: await res.json(),
  };
};