Improvements to API validation logic.

Improvements to API validation logic.

Do not automatically map generic exceptions like AttributeError to
http errors (instead they should be handled closer to where they occur
so that they can be "intelligently" converted to the appropriate
error).

Fix up some expected error codes in the unit tests.
Improve some of the validation messages.
Remove all use of locals() in attributes.py

Fixes: bug #1076813
Change-Id: Iabf8808a840e927307bbcae4cd41790af3d79a9e