Best way to specify we only want to validate the response?

[harrisj]

Things have been working great for 200 responses from my API, but I am interested in using flex to validate API responses for invalid inputs like when a query parameter is not within an enum. The issue I have right now is that the validator rejects the request as being malformed (which it is by design) before it verifies the response. I'd like to file a PR to allow me to just validate the response, but it seems like there are a few options I can explore:

1. Call validate_response directly, but this seems like I am violating the abstraction, and I would also need to normalize the response before I pass it in. But this would work now without any changes, I think
2. Refactor the validate_api_call method to call a validate_api_response method that is a wrapper around the normalize_response and validate_response methods that I could just call from methods where I want to validate the response.
3. Add a parameter like only= to validate_api_call that takes either response or request as arguments and uses that for calling the validation.

I was leaning towards the third option at first, but I realized that people might think they don't have to pass in a request object when only=response but we still need that request object to know the HTTP method we are validating the response for. So I am kinda leaning towards the second option since it makes that more explicit. What do you think?

[ahartoto]

I vote for option 2. Let me elaborate a little more.

Option 2 will allow us to keep it backward compatible, and add a new functionality. Adding a new parameter can cause confusion when one changes a version from another.