Detect XML Requests in Before Filter / OAuth

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I am working on a RESTful website and also want to support XML as content type. However, I want to protect all XML actions with OAuth so that we can control, monitor and maybe limit access to the API in the future.

I installed the Rails oauth-plugin which works perfectly. I added this to the application controller:

before_filter :require_oauth_for_xml_requests

def require_oauth_for_xml_requests   if params[:format] == 'xml'     oauth_required   else     true   end end

The problem is that this only works if accessing something like '/users.xml'. If HTTP headers are set instead I cannot detect the proper type. The action is not protected if I use:

curl -H 'Accept: application/xml' -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' 'http://localhost:3000/users’

The HTTP headers can be inspected in the request object but there are many combinations and it is probably not a good idea to just check if the content-type equals "application/xml" as it can also be placed at another position in the list.

How could my require_oauth_for_xml_requests method be fixed to detect all XML requests?

I would appreciate any help.

Thanks, Sascha

2

Sure… and it’s reasonable to figure out why that’s not working for you - params[:format] is just whatever’s in the querystring. You want to check the actual request’s content type. From what I’ve seen you want to explicitly ask for the requested format.

def require_oauth_for_xml_requests

if request.format.xml?

oauth_required

else

true

end

end

See if that works.

3

Thanks Brian, it works. This is was what I was looking for!