Laravel response status code set to 400 but browser reports 200 - backbone.js

Question

I'm trying to return a 400 status code from Laravel. I've setup a simple test in my controller:
return Response::json(["Test", "Array"], 400);
And look at web inspector I get a 200 OK.
If I dump the response:
object(Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse)#306 (8) {
["data":protected]=>
string(16) "["Test","Array"]"
["callback":protected]=>
NULL
["headers"]=>
object(Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\ResponseHeaderBag)#315 (5) {
["computedCacheControl":protected]=>
array(1) {
["no-cache"]=>
bool(true)
}
["cookies":protected]=>
array(0) {
}
["headerNames":protected]=>
array(3) {
["cache-control"]=>
string(13) "Cache-Control"
["date"]=>
string(4) "Date"
["content-type"]=>
string(12) "Content-Type"
}
["headers":protected]=>
array(3) {
["cache-control"]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
string(8) "no-cache"
}
["date"]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
string(29) "Wed, 02 Apr 2014 20:03:14 GMT"
}
["content-type"]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
string(16) "application/json"
}
}
["cacheControl":protected]=>
array(0) {
}
}
["content":protected]=>
string(16) "["Test","Array"]"
["version":protected]=>
string(3) "1.0"
["statusCode":protected]=>
int(400)
["statusText":protected]=>
string(11) "Bad Request"
["charset":protected]=>
NULL
}
I can see that the status code is set to 400 and the statusText is Bad Request.
Basically I'm using Backbone.js in conjunction with Laravel and need to return a status code other than 200 to catch errors on save.
This seems like such a simple thing to do, does anyone know what I'm having this issue?
UPDATE
After some head bashing I've found a (not very ideal) work around to achieve what I need, and logged a issue on the Laravel GitHub: https://github.com/laravel/laravel/issues/2796
Basically I took my controller out of the equation and tried this as a route:
Route::get('/bad-request', function() {
$response['state'] = "error";
$response['errors'] = ["name" => ["A product name is required"]];
return Response::json($response, 400);
});
Same issue, returns a 200. Found this work around for the time being:
Route::get('/bad-request', function() {
$response['state'] = "error";
$response['errors'] = ["name" => ["A product name is required"]];
http_response_code(400);
return Response::json($response, 400);
});
I'd much rather do this with Laravel than forcing it with PHP. Also I've tried Response::make and that does exactly the same thing.

Answer 1

I ran into this problem myself recently, it should work but for some reason it doesn't. You need to make the response object yourself.
Response::make(["Test", "Array"], 400);
This will still return the array as JSON automatically for some reason...

Answer 2

this worked for me:
new Response(Array,400); //will return 400
although the api will tell you otherwise, this is not working:
new Response()->json(Array,400); // will return 200
new Response()->make(Array,400); // will return 200