PDF generation · Implement
PDF API Error Handling and Retry Best Practices
Classify authentication, validation, limit, and rendering failures before deciding whether and how to retry.
For developer · 8 min · Reviewed Jul 31, 2026
Separate deterministic from transient failures
A request that violates authentication, ownership, schema, payload-size, or template-selection rules will not succeed unchanged. Rendering infrastructure or temporary network failures may be retryable.
Preserve actionable context safely
Record endpoint, timestamp, status, safe correlation identifier, template UUID, and selected version or environment. Never log tokens, complete payloads, or generated document contents.
Retry with a policy
Use bounded exponential backoff with jitter. Honor service guidance, stop after a defined attempt or time budget, and use an idempotency key for synchronous retries.
Prefer jobs for durable workflows
Async generation gives the operation an explicit job state and separates rendering from browser or gateway timeouts. Batch generation lets individual items succeed or fail independently.
Make errors useful to users
Map field-level validation errors to the input or source integration responsible for them. Escalate repeated service failures with redacted operational context rather than a screenshot containing customer data.