Sending a fire&forget http request in a model class.

rubyonrails-talk
1

I know this is bad mvc, but i have a model class that needs to send a request off to a web service. At the moment i'm building a request string with url and params, and then doing a 'system' call to call curl with the url. This feels pretty dirty though. Is there a nicer way to just fire off an http request?

thanks max

2

I know this is bad mvc, but i have a model class that needs to send a request off to a web service. At the moment i'm building a request string with url and params, and then doing a 'system' call to call
curl with the url. This feels pretty dirty though. Is there a nicer way
to just fire off an http request?

net/http or similar ?

Fred

3

Hey, I would check this out: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/index.html

Syntax looks something like:

http = Net::HTTP.new(“www.google.com”) headers, body = http.get()

Hope that help Jim Englert http://www.jim-rants.com/coding-blog/

4

Thanks Fred

I'm not having any luck with it so far - this is the curl call i was making (with some changes to protect the innocent):

curl http://www.l-mail.biz/scripts/lia/lia.php \ -d l_cid='1106' \ -d l_key='cg3608898b74a4c688787ab479b8bb9f' \ -d l_content='http://ir.chazanga.com/letter/show?encoded=MTE4MiZpdCdzIHdlZG5lc2RheQ==’ \ -d l_pb_url='http://ir.chazanga.com/letter/confirm’ \ -d l_sname='chazanga' \ -d l_rname='Max Williams' \ -d l_rcname='chazanga' \ -d l_raddress1='Suites 17 & 18' \ -d l_raddress2='9-12 Middle Street' \ -d l_rcity='Brighton' \ -d l_rpostcode='BN1 3TN' \ -d l_rcountry='3' \ -d l_email='maxilliams@chazanga.com' \ -d l_fb_emails='1' \ -d p_user_id='2054'

So, when i tried to use Net::HTTP i was trying to deal with this massive params string. I split it up like so:

domain = "www.l-mail.biz"

path = "/scripts/lia/lia.php"

params = "l_cid=1106&l_key=cg3608898b74a4c688787ab479b8bb9f&l_content=http://ir.chazanga.com/letter/show?encoded=MTE4MiZpdCdzIHdlZG5lc2RheQ==&l_pb_url=http://ir.chazanga.com/letter/confirm&l_sname=chazanga&l_rname=Max-Williams&l_rcname=chazanga&l_raddress1=Suites-17-18&l_raddress2=9-12-Middle-Street&l_rcity=Brighton&l_rpostcode=BN1-3TN&l_rcountry=3&l_email=maxwilliams@chazanga.com&l_fb_emails=1&p_user_id=2054"

The params string had spaces and & signs in it, so i just replaced them with safe characters temporarily while i played with Net::HTTP (with escaping them properly down for a later task).

I tried this:

http = Net::HTTP.new("#{domain}") headers, body = http.get("#{path}?#{params}")

and got a 401 (Authorisation required) error back. I think maybe my params weren't going through properly.

5

Yuck. would be a lot easier to take a hash of params (ie {'l_cid' => '1106', 'l_key' => 'cg3608898b74a4c688787ab479b8bb9f', ...} and then call to_query on it.

Net::HTTP will also do that for you, with something like

response = Net::HTTP.start(host, port) do |http|    get = Net::HTTP::Get.new path    get.form_data = some_hash    get.content_type = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"    http.request get end

Fred