Hey B. R.,

Thanks for your reply! I will have a look at the provided resources.

As per your comment:

> I find it strange you oppose HTTP 404 with 'a proper status code': 404 is a 'proper' status code.
> I find it even stranger you want to lie to search engines crawlers about the existence of your resource.

Maybe my wording was just misleading. Of course 404 is a "proper" status code and my posting was all about how to be able to return the appropriate code (404 in case the item does not exist) to the crawler instead of the 200 that it will see if I just deliver the client application and show a "soft" 404 error – which is my current setup which I want to improve by checking the item's existence prior to delivering the response.

Thanks again.