Opinions on using HTTP request headers to switch between website (HTML) and api (JSON) - html

We have an ecommerce website that displays groups of products by category using a URL format that maps almost exactly to the REST URL format we would like to use for our forthcoming API.
e.g. example.com/products/latest or example.com/products/hats
Is it a valid pattern to use the same URL for visible (HTML) and invisible (JSON) results, and to use the Accept http request header to determine what should be returned.
i.e. if you call example.com/products/latest with Accept: application/json you get just the product data, but if you use text/html you get the full HTML page (header, footer, site chrome etc.)
And if so, is this a good idea - will we run into problems if, for instance, the website needs to change, but the API needs to be stable?
UPDATE: some helpful resources - here is an article[1] by Peter Williams discussing the use of the HTTP Accept header to version APIs, and I have also referenced an SO question[2] that reveals some of the problems of using this approach. Probably better to use a custom HTTP header?
[1] Making the case for using Accept: http://barelyenough.org/blog/2008/05/versioning-rest-web-services/
[2] Problems with jQuery (& IE): Cannot properly set the Accept HTTP header with jQuery
[3] Making the case for using Accept: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/2011/07/03/nobody-understands-rest-or-http.html
[4] Sitting on the fence: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1566460

Using http headers is generally becoming the accepted way of determining this.
In ASP.NET MVC for example there is an IsAjaxRequest method that checks for the X-Requested-With header and if it is equal to "XMLHttpRequest" it is deemed to be an ajax request.

Last time I tried to do that (and this was a few years ago) I found I could not override the Accept header of an XMLHttpRequest object in Opera. If that isn't a worry for you, then go for it, that is how HTTP was designed to work.
I recommend setting your HTML response to have a higher q value then your JSON response though, some browsers send Accept: */*.

I have no experience with this, but Restful Web Services recommends that you version your API via the URL (e.g. api.example.com/v1/products/hats) — I’m not sure that would fit with using the same URLs for the website and the API.

Related

Origin of iframe when sandbox is enabled without allow-same-origin [duplicate]

As you can see from this Bugzilla thread (and also), Firefox does not always send an Origin header in POST requests. The RFC states that it should not be sent in certain undefined "privacy-sensitive" contexts. Mozilla defines those contexts here.
I'd like to know whether these are the only situations in which Firefox will not send the Origin header. As far as I can tell, it also will not send it in cross-origin POST requests (though Chrome and Internet Explorer will), but I can't confirm that in the documentation. Is it enumerated somewhere that I'm missing?
As far as what the relevant specs actually require, the answer has a couple parts:
When browsers must internally set an origin to a value that’ll get serialized as null
When browsers must send the Origin header
Here are the details:
When browsers must set origin to a value that’ll get serialized as null
The HTML spec uses the term opaque origin and defines it as an “internal value”:
with no serialization it can be recreated from (it is serialized as "null" per ASCII serialization of an origin), for which the only meaningful operation is testing for equality
In other words everywhere the HTML spec says opaque origin, you can translate that to null.
The HTML spec requires browsers to set an opaque origin or unique origin in these cases:
Cross-origin images (including cross-origin img elements)
Cross-origin media data (including cross-origin video and audio elements)
Any document generated from a data: URL
Any iframe with a sandbox attribute that doesn’t contain the value allow-same-origin
Any document programmatically created using createDocument(), etc.
Any document that does not have a creator browsing context
Responses that are network errors
The Should navigation response to navigation request of type from source in target be blocked by Content Security Policy? algorithm returns Blocked when executed on a navigate response
The Fetch spec requires browsers to set the origin to a “globally unique identifier” (which basically means the same thing as “opaque origin” which basically means null…) in one case:
Redirects across origins
The URL spec requires browsers to set an opaque origin in the following cases:
For blob: URLs
For file: URLs
For any other URLs whose scheme is not one of http, https, ftp, ws, wss, or gopher.
But note that just because the browser has internally set an opaque origin—essentially null—that doesn’t necessarily mean the browser will send an Origin header. So see the next part of this answer for details about when browsers must send the Origin header.
When browsers must send the Origin header
Browsers send the Origin header for cross-origin requests initiated by a fetch() or XHR call, or by an ajax method from a JavaScript library (axios, jQuery, etc.) — but not for normal page navigations (that is, when you open a web page directly in a browser), and not (normally) for resources embedded in a web page (for example, not for CSS stylesheets, scripts, or images).
But that description is a simplification. There are cases other than cross-origin XHR/fetch/ajax calls when browsers send the Origin header, and cases when browsers send the Origin header for embedded resources. So what follows below is the longer answer.
In terms of the spec requirements: The spec requires the Origin header to be sent only for any request which the Fetch spec defines as a CORS request:
A CORS request is an HTTP request that includes an Origin header. It cannot be reliably identified as participating in the CORS protocol as the Origin header is also included for all requests whose method is neither GET nor HEAD.
So, what the spec means there is: The Origin header is sent in all cross-origin requests, but it’s also always sent for all POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests — even for same-origin POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests (which by definition in Fetch are actually “CORS requests” — even though they’re same-origin).*
The other cases when browsers must send the Origin header are any cases where a request is made with the “CORS flag” set — which, as far as HTTP(S) requests, is except when the request mode is navigate, websocket, same-origin, or no-cors.
XHR always sets the mode to cors. But with the Fetch API, those request modes are the ones you can set with the mode field of the init-object argument to the fetch(…) method:
fetch("http://example.com", { mode: 'no-cors' }) // no Origin will be sent
Font requests always have the mode set to cors and so always have the Origin header.
And for any element with a crossorigin attribute (aka “CORS setting attribute”), the HTML spec requires browsers to set the request mode to cors (and to send the Origin header).
Otherwise, for embedded resources — any elements having attributes with URLs that initiate requests (<script src>, stylesheets, images, media elements) — the mode for the requests defaults to no-cors; and since those requests are GET requests, that means, per-spec, browsers send no Origin header for them.
When HTML form elements initiate POST requests, the mode for those POSTs also defaults to no-cors — in the same way that embedded resources have their mode defaulted to no-cors. However, unlike the no-cors mode GET requests for embedded resources, browsers do send the Origin header for those no-cors mode POSTs initiated from HTML form elements.
The reason for that is, as mentioned earlier in this answer, browsers always send the Origin header in all POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests.
Also, for completeness here and to be clear: For navigations, browsers send no Origin header. That is, if a user navigates directly to a resource — by pasting a URL into a browser address bar, or by following a link from another web document — then browsers send no Origin header.
* The algorithm in the Fetch spec that requires browsers to send the Origin header for all CORS requests is this:
To append a request Origin header, given a request request, run these steps:
1. Let serializedOrigin be the result of byte-serializing a request origin with request.
2. If request’s response tainting is "cors" or request’s mode is "websocket", then
    append Origin/serializedOrigin to request’s header list.
3. Otherwise, if request’s method is neither GET nor HEAD,
    then: [also send the Origin header in that case too]
Step 2 there is what requires the Origin header to be sent in all cross-origin requests — because all cross-origin requests have their response tainting set to "cors".
But step 3 there requires the Origin header to also be sent for same-origin POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests (which by definition in Fetch are actually “CORS requests” — even though they’re same-origin).
The above describes how the Fetch spec currently defines the requirements, due to a change that was made to the spec on 2016-12-09. Up until then the requirements were different:
  •  previously no Origin was sent for a same-origin POST
  •  previously no Origin was sent for cross-origin POST from a <form> (without CORS)
So the Firefox behavior the question describes is what the spec previously required, not what it currently requires.
For me this was happening on a super-standard form POST to a relative URL on localhost, and seems to have been triggered by having
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer">
in the <head>.
Changing it to
<meta name="referrer" content="same-origin">
seemed to make Firefox happier.

Schemeless URL valid in HTTP?

Are schemeless urls like
//blog.flowl.info/
valid in HTTP (rfc?), like in plain HTTP Requests and Responses, or are they only valid in HTML attributes and content ?
HTTP/1.1 302 - Moved
Location: //blog.flowl.info
GET //blog.flowl.info
Update:
I have two contradictionary answers now. Which is correct?
Sidequestion:
Why does the browser even resolve those to:
//blog.flowl.info/
->
http://blog.flowl.info/
instead of:
//blog.flowl.info/
->
http://blog.flowl.info///blog.flowl.info/
They are valid in the Location header field (http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc7231.html#header.location).
They are not valid in the request line of an HTTP request.
The browser resolves it this way because this is how relative reference resolution works (http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc3986.html#reference-resolution).
As far as I understand protocol/scheme is a mandatory part of an URL and is used by server and intermediate proxies/gateways etc to infer how to handle communication on top of plain TCP/IP. If you are not using http/https but some other well known or even custom protocol, you will have to specify it.
Browser was created for browsing html pages served over HTTP protocol. Hence if you don't specify scheme it automatically defaults it as http. There is also concept of absolute v/s relative URL that you will need to look into how subsequent URLs are resolved by browser.

Restfullyii prepending <link> tag to the json response

Hi I'm new to restfulyii
I'm having a problem with the json response a tag is being prepended
Refer to the code below
(just assume that there are '<>' for the link tag)
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/assets/e5ba1689/srbac.css" />{"success":true,"message":"Record(s) Found","data":{"totalCount":1,"share":[{"id":"0","elementid":"1","type":"video","suid":"1","duid":"5","permissions":"superuser"}]}}
this coming from api/ under GET method and same with other rest verbs
I can't parse my JSON data because of the prepended line.
Please help..
reference:
localhost/api/ - method: GET/POST/PUT/DELETE
Everything is working fine with restful yii except that json response format...
Thanks in advance!
Ohmel Paguirigan
The problem seams to be that YII is not recognizing that your request is an actual Ajax request.
Search in srbac/components/Helper.php for:
if (!Yii::app()->request->isAjaxRequest){
Yii::app()->clientScript->registerCssFile($cssFile);
}
You will notice that SRBAC is checking if your request is an actual Ajax request.
Yoshi on the Yii Forms says that:
yii checks if there is a X-Requested-With HTTP header set (which
should result in an $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] server variable)
and whether it contains the string 'XMLHttpRequest'. But this is a
custom header set by most javascript libraries (and so does jQuery).
There are e.g. some proxies which drop these custom headers (mainly
for security reasons) and therefore your application can't recognize
whether it's an ajax request or not. It's not 100% reliable.
Therefore, you must make sure that your javascript library is injecting this Header.
To do this in Javascript, in your app.run
add the following:
$http.defaults.headers.common['X-Requested-With'] = 'XMLHttpRequest';
Then, all of y our http requests in angular will send the header yii needs to discern that an AjaxRequest is being sent!
Hope this helps!

Submit a "pure" HTTP request from HTML page

I need to send the following HTTP request to my REST server from an HTML page to retrieve another page. How to do that using javascript or forms or links or whatever ?
Note that the HTTP request body must contain plain text with no key/value pairs as a form usually does.
PUT /somerequest HTTP/1.1
Host: www.myhost.com
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml
Payload of the request to be read by the server script.
The script will return a HTML content to my browser.
Thanks !
You could use jQuery?
http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/
I'm sure you will find what you want there.
And if you don't look at a lower layer: XMLHttpRequest
http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/

How to get result back from CGI(C) to the same HTML page?

Can I display the result which is processed in the CGI(using C) on the same html page, from where the CGI is invoked?
Regards,
MalarN
No, HTTP does not work that way.
You would have to make a asyncronious request (using JavaScript, this is commonly known as AJAX) instead.
In a nutshell, you can spawn a background HTTP request to your CGI process, instead of posting the browser to it in the main HTTP request.
See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest