I had the same requirement and after much exploring under the hood was able to find a workable solution.
The reason why setting the property:
mc.setProperty('HTTP_SC', "404");
didn't work is that the property needs to be set in the axis2 scope (as Abimaran said). mc.setProperty doesn't set it on that scope. Moreover, the MessageContext object doesn't provide a way to set the scope.
The 'Deploy as Prototype' action actually creates the API definition file by merging the specified in-line script into the a velocity template and storing the resulting API definition into a file.
- Template: ./repository/resources/api_templates/prototype_template.xml
- Output location: repository/deployment/server/synapse-configs/default/api/
The output file will have a name in the format:
provider--API Name-vVERSION.xml
where provider appears to be the username of the API creator.
What I did was add a filter to the template:
<filter source="boolean(get-property('HTTP_SC'))" regex="false">
<then>
<property name="HTTP_SC" value="200" scope="axis2"/>
</then>
<else>
<property name="HTTP_SC" expression="get-property('HTTP_SC')" scope="axis2"/>
</else>
</filter>
I added it immediately after a similar block (for handling CONTENT_TYPE) at the start of the inSequence element.