Backend Error and Retrieving activity limitation

Question

When ever i try to retrieve the google plus post of a particular user, i get the following message

{ "error": { "errors": [ { "domain": "buzz", "reason": "backendError", "message": "Backend Error" } ], "code": 503, "message": "Backend Error" } }

The query fails only for few peoples (consistently) but still it's important for me, below is the query which i am using.

https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/"user_id"/activities/public? maxResults=100&key="Api_key"

And when ever i try to retrieve the posts of a user for whom the above query works perfectly, i am only able to retrieve last 250 posts.

Is there a way to retrieve all the post which they have posted so far?

Are you trying this from a web browser? I'm having the same problem but for some reason, the query works with curl but not from jQuery.ajax :-/ — Roman Nurik
Nevermind my issue. I was treating profile IDs as Numbers in JavaScript and I was losing precision. Always use Strings :-) — Roman Nurik
I don't get the above error message while retrieving the post through php client library but i am only able to retrieve 200 posts :( — Munavvar Ahmed

Roman Nurik Roman Nurik · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-16T16:04:16

I was having this issue as well, and the problem I was running into was that I was storing profile IDs in JavaScript as Number values, which was chopping off precision. So 113735310430199015092 was being rounded to 113735310430199020000. The lesson there is to always store Google+ profile IDs as String values in JavaScript.

So the 'backendError' was basically being thrown due to an invalid or otherwise inaccessible profile ID.

Now, I'm not sure if that's the exact issue you're running into, since 'backendError' is fairly generic, and a 5xx HTTP code says nothing about the validity of your response, but it's something to watch out for. I'm hoping in the future the API will return a more useful 4xx status code for these error cases.

Backend Error and Retrieving activity limitation

2 Answers