Steps to reproduce the issue

When creating an Article from the Interface, if the automatically generated alias already exists within the given Category then Joomla does it very nicely:

• it does create the Article
• but adapts its Alias and throws the following message: Alias already existed so a number was added at the end. You can re-edit the article to customise the alias.

But apparently, when doing the equivalent from the Web Services, Joomla does not do the equivalent:

• it does not create the Article
• and throws an error message (code 400: Save failed with the following error: Another Article in this category has the same alias.

Expected result

Shouldn't the behaviour be the same / consistent / coherent ?

It would be much easier to manage Article creation in case some Aliases are already "taken" within the given Category.

Actual result

Joomla's behaviour regarding alias is different whether you use

• the Interface
• the Web Services

System information (as much as possible)

J5.3

Additional comments

Joomla should be easy to use. If things are unnecessarily too complex, people just give up.

• "code scenario"
  • of course, one could argue that programmatically a developer could manage every scenario, even this inconsistency. But that would be overkill. Indeed, just to manage this everyone would have to re-invent the wheel and have a long procedure
• "no-code scenario"
  • there is already a Joomla integration for Make.com (and soon Zapier etc). There also, managing that "alias already exists" thing is overkill: instead of having a one-step scenario ("create article") you need to have like 10 steps...

If really some people still prefer to do it the hard way (ie get a 400 error when using the Web Services) then we could make everybody happy as follows: we just add a parameter to say whether

• we want to get a 400 error
• we want the Article to be created with the same rule as when when using the Interface