Swift POST statement returns 500 status code - ios

Question

I'm trying to make a post call to a server and I receive a 500 status code. I've tried both sending a serialized json object and an encoded string with parameters. I don't have access to the server so I don't know if it's an issue with the server, but GET and DELETE calls work. POST and PUT don't. Here's the code:
guard let urlComponents = NSURLComponents(string: url) else
{
print("error creating URL")
return (nil, nil)
}
for (key, value) in urlParameters
{
urlComponents.queryItems = [NSURLQueryItem(name:key, value:value)]
}
let urlRequest = NSMutableURLRequest(URL: urlComponents.URL!)
urlRequest.HTTPMethod = "POST"
let config = NSURLSessionConfiguration.defaultSessionConfiguration()
let session = NSURLSession(configuration: config)
do
{
let jsonUser = try NSJSONSerialization.dataWithJSONObject(["firstname": "Bob", "lastname": "Johnson", "summary": "Hi"], options: [])
urlRequest.HTTPBody = jsonUser
}
catch
{
print("Error: cannot create JSON from user")
}
let task = session.dataTaskWithRequest(urlRequest)
{
(data, response, error) in
....
I've also tried setting the httpbody like so:
let postString = "firstname=Jack&lastname=Daniels&summary=hello"
urlRequest.HTTPBody = postString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
This is the server response I get:
response: <NSHTTPURLResponse: 0x7ff3137a3b70> { URL: https://somelink } { status code: 500, headers {
Connection = "keep-alive";
"Content-Length" = 1477;
"Content-Type" = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
Date = "Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:42:52 GMT";
Server = "WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.4/2015-12-16)";
Via = "1.1 vegur";
"X-Request-Id" = "4c414334-4412-48a4-a61f-c17658182bdf";
"X-Runtime" = "0.007021";
} }
Is this a problem with my POST request or the server?

Answer 1

It seems that the problem was the response wasn't formatted the way the server was attempting to read it. So if anyone else has this problem, double check your server (in my case I had to email someone and receive the correct format).

Answer 2

A 500 is an internal server error. There's no way to know from the client why it's returning that. You need to speak with someone who runs the server.
The only thing I see that you may have wrong is this:
for (key, value) in urlParameters
{
urlComponents.queryItems = [NSURLQueryItem(name:key, value:value)]
}
It should probably be this:
urlComponents.queryItems = []
for (key, value) in urlParameters
{
urlComponents.queryItems?.append(NSURLQueryItem(name:key, value:value))
}