Help Receiving a http POST to my application

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi.. I'm just getting started with Ruby and am creating an API that will receive POST requests from its users.

I've got a "fake" user sending POST requests to the right controller in my application, but I can't seem to access the data being posted. (the create method in my controller is being invoked...so I know I'm addressing the POST call correctly)

The data being posted is: name=johnny&amount=928339

How do I capture this in the controller, create a new record and populate the name and amount fields in my database?

I don't want to use XML...my data must be in the above format.

Thanks!!!

2

Have you tried peeking at the params hash you get passed?

Fred

3

Teo Sor wrote:

Hi.. I'm just getting started with Ruby and am creating an API that will receive POST requests from its users.

I've got a "fake" user sending POST requests to the right controller in my application, but I can't seem to access the data being posted. (the create method in my controller is being invoked...so I know I'm addressing the POST call correctly)

The data being posted is: name=johnny&amount=928339

How do I capture this in the controller,

The POST data should be parsed by Rails and made available through the params-method:

params[:name] params[:amount]

create a new record and populate the name and amount fields in my database?

Model.create(...)

4

Christian Rishøj wrote:

Teo Sor wrote:

How do I capture this in the controller,

The POST data should be parsed by Rails and made available through the params-method:

params[:name] params[:amount]

create a new record and populate the name and amount fields in my database?

Model.create(...)

I tried using the params method, but it seems to be empty (I used params[:trans].inspect and it's empty (trans is my controller)). I even tried using request.env['RAW_POST_DATA'] to see if there was anything there...and I'm getting nothing!

I'm stumped!

5

If the POST is correctly landing on the server... try enabling debug logging which should give you something like this in the logs:

Processing TransController#create (for ::1 at 2008-08-19 00:23:22) [POST]   Parameters: {"commit"=>"create", "name"=> "my name", "action"=>"create", "controller"=>"trans"}

??

And the params would be:

logger.debug("[DEBUG] - This is the name param => #{params[:name]}")

This all depends however on the form/fake user that does the post...

6

One other thing to consider is whether the poster is setting the correct mime type - rails will parse the parameters differently depending if its a multipart form, xml, good old application/x-www- form-urlencoded etc...

Fred

7

The name of the controller is unrelated to params. The keys in params reflect their names, as seen in Christian's reply. You'd print params.inspect.

8

Sorry that was half-edited. I meant the keys in params correspond to the names of the parameters themselves.

9

Hey everyone thanks for all the help! I think I finally got it. I'm not using a Ruby friendly post format, so I didn't want Ruby to assume a post format and parse it into the hash automatically. In the end, I used the following to get the raw post data...and now I'm going to parse it out myself.

request.raw_post.to_s

Again...Thanks for the help!

T

10

Sounds like you found a workaround, but this is the way to do it:

Say for example the HTTP POST URL is www.mywebsite.com/messages/incoming?name=johnny&amount=928339

In the incoming method of the messages_controller.rb, you can access these parameters as follows:

@variable1 = params[:name] @variable2 = params[:amount]

-Gavin