Post from controller

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi All

I have a newbie question.

I have a RESTful controller that has a standard create method, however I also want to POST a request to a separate external URL from this same method.

  def create     @out_message = OutMessage.new(params[:out_message])

    post_to_external_url(@out_message.content)

    respond_to do |format|       if @out_message.save         flash[:notice] = 'OutMessage was successfully created.'         format.html { redirect_to out_message_url(@out_message) }         format.xml { head :created, :location => out_message_url(@out_message) }       else         format.html { render :action => "new" }         format.xml { render :xml => @out_message.errors.to_xml }       end     end   end

  private   def post_to_external_url(content)     # code that sends a post request to http://www.someexteranlurl.com/processme   end

What I really wish to do is create a new POST request add all my arguments to it, POST it and then redirect back to my 'out_message_url(@out_message)' or index.rhtml page for this controller.

I can see that I could use the 'redirect_to' method but it seems that this can only send a GET request, how can I send a POST request?

Any clues how I should go about this, without having to resort to creating a new view with a form and a POST action?

Many thanks,

Ben...

2

fredmsun wrote:

  def post_to_external_url(content)     # code that sends a post request to http://www.someexteranlurl.com/processme   end

Use Net::HTTP to connect to the other site:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Net/HTTP.html

3

Hi Mark

I actually tried this but I get a 'stack level too deep' error message. If I run the Rails console I seem to get alot of warnings about HTTP variables already being declared, when the code hits the require 'net/ HTTP' call.

I then just put this piece of code into the 'post_to_external_url(content)' method and get the 'stack level too deep' error:

Net::HTTP.get_print URI.parse('Example Domain’)

However when I run it on its own using IRB it works no problem.

I'm not sure why I get these conflicts, and I'm not sure of a 'Rails' way of sending new Requests from a Controller. All I want to do is call another RESTful web service and put that value into my model, but without going via a view.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreaciated. Many thanks,

Ben...

4

fredmsun wrote:

I actually tried this but I get a 'stack level too deep' error message. If I run the Rails console I seem to get alot of warnings about HTTP variables already being declared, when the code hits the require 'net/ HTTP' call.

Where are you putting the require? What variables is it complaining about?

I'm not sure why I get these conflicts, and I'm not sure of a 'Rails' way of sending new Requests from a Controller. All I want to do is call another RESTful web service and put that value into my model, but without going via a view.

The alternative is to use an ActiveResource model to proxy the remote RESTful model interface. Then you can access the remote data similar to accessing a local model...

5

If a working example helps, see if something like this does the trick. It basically sets up an encrypted post to https://gatewaybeta.fedex.com/xml.

url = 'gatewaybeta.fedex.com' path = "/xml" headers = {"Content-Type" => "text/xml"} h = Net::HTTP.new(url, 443) h.use_ssl = true xmlrequest = "a bunch of xml..." resp, data = h.post(path, xmlrequest, headers) #posts the request

From here, you can do whatever you want with the response status (contained in the 'resp' varaible) and/or response data (contained in the 'data' variable).

I don't know much about how this affects threading, performance, etc., so others should feel free to chime in if I'm doing something horrible. (Heck, I'd appreciate knowing about it!)

-Kyle

6

Hi All

Thanks so much for your help. Mark you were right I was using require 'net/http' and this was conflicting with my controller. I removed the require altogether and it worked fine.

Although I had tried moving the 'require' around previously, I had failed to notice that my Mongrel test server had crashed and so was continually getting the 'stack too deep' error message.

Kyle thanks for that code snippet its most useful and good to see how other people approach problems like these.

Many thanks,

Ben...