feat:Global Error Handlers #28

[abhayrajjais01]

Description

This PR addresses Issue #28 by implementing standardized global JSON error handlers for 404 Not Found and 500 Internal Server Error in the Flask backend.

Note: Since the codebase routes 404s to the frontend React app by default, special care was taken to only return JSON 404s for API-specific routes to avoid breaking the frontend router.

What was changed

• Added an @app.errorhandler(404) in API/app.py. It checks the request headers (Accept: application/json) and path (/api/) to determine if it should return a standardized JSON error message or fall back to the React index page.
• Added a global Exception handler @app.errorhandler(Exception) that catches global server-side exceptions (500s) and returns a uniform JSON response. This was necessary to ensure the WSGI web server (waitress) propagates the formatted JSON error to the client instead of standard HTML debugging logs.

Verification

• Triggered a 404 on an API route (/api/non-existent) and verified the correct JSON error response block was returned.
• Confirmed that non-API routes still serve the frontend static index.html.
• Triggered an induced Exception during testing and verified the internal server error is caught and formatted properly as JSON.

Fixes #28

[arnchlmcodes]

Hey, I noticed there's a related PR (#33) introducing an api_response() helper to standardize response formatting across routes. Since the error handlers here currently construct the response dictionary manually, I was wondering if it might be worth considering using that helper once it lands. That could help keep success and error responses aligned from a single source of truth and avoid small format differences over time. Happy to hear what you think

[abhayrajjais01]

"Thanks for the review, @arnchlmcodes , I completely agree that standardizing our responses is the way to go here i will pull in the changes from PR #33 and refactor these error handlers to use the api_response helper to ensure consistency