Takeaways
- The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed.
- The request might or might not eventually be acted upon, as it might be disallowed when processing actually takes place.
- There is no facility in HTTP for re-sending a status code from an asynchronous operation.
Information
The 202 Accepted response is intentionally non-committal. Its purpose is to allow a server to accept a request for some other process (perhaps a batch-oriented process that is only run once per day) without requiring that the user agent's connection to the server persist until the process is completed.
The representation sent with this response ought to describe the request's current status and point to (or embed) a status monitor that can provide the user with an estimate of when the request will be fulfilled.