When I make API calls to the server, I'm getting 404 errors for various data -- grades, role IDs, terms -- that I won't get on the next time I call it. The data's there on the server, viewable by the same user, and is often returned successfully, but not every time. The same user context will return data successfully for other calls.
Any ideas what could be causing this?
I'm using the Valence API with the Python client library and our 9.4.1 SP18 instance of Desire2Learn in a non-interactive script.
more detail: the text it returns on the bad 404s is " ErrorThe system cannot find the path specified."
It would help enormously to gather data about your case: packet traces that can show successful calls from your client alongside unsuccessful calls, in particular, would be very useful to see. If you are quite certain (and I see no reason you shouldn't be from your description) that you're forming the calls in the right way each time you make them, then the kind of behaviour you're noticing would seem to speak to some wider network or configuration issue: sometimes your calls are properly getting through the web service layer, and sometimes they are not -- this would seem therefore not to be down to the way you're using the API but in the way the service is able to receive that request.
I would encourage you, especially if you can gather data to provide showing this behaviour, to open a support incident with Desire2Learn's help desk in conjunction with your Approved Support Contact, or your Partner Manager (depending on whether you're a D2L client or a D2L partner).
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I am planning to make a browser extension which uses Youtube data API v3. Since the code is public to the user, I am unable to use my API-key in the code. What is the correct way to use API in such a scenario? Also, since the API call will be made from user's browser, is there any other way to fetch data without using API-key at all?
TL;DR
On the API screen of Google Cloud Console, create a new key or edit an existing one to have no restriction. This will enable anyone to use this key to make requests the moment you publish it. There is no way to use the YouTube API without a key (or token respectively, when using OAuth). Your clients are allowed to consume up to 50.000.000 quota units per day, after which your app will essentially break for the rest of the day unless you buy more quota.
However, I have to disagree with the statement that you cannot (or "shouldn't") publish your API key; in certain scenarios, this may very well be desired.
Detailed Explanation
Web application keys used to be organized in two groups: Server keys and browser keys, the former of which where to be kept secret on the server of the web application, while the latter was sent to the client for use in JavaScript. Server keys could be configured to only be accepted from certain IP addresses. That way, even if someone got hold of your key, they wouldn't be able to use it. Browser keys could be restricted to a specified referrer, i.e. the domain (as in DNS) of your web application, so it wouldn't work on other sites beside your own either.
Nowadays, there is no distinction between server and browser keys anymore, they are simply called "API keys". This union makes perfect sense to me, since the only difference between the two types was how they were restricted. With the new API keys, one can still choose how to restrict its usage - or choose to not restrict the key at all.
This is where we get back to your case: It is, of course, possible to publish a key and at the same time not restrict it. Depending on how many users are using your app (and will be using it in the future) and how many are using your key for their own app (which you have no control over), the 50 million quota limit will work out for you or it will not.
An then there's responsibility as well. You are responsible for the queries that are made with your API key. This is probably one of the reasons why YouTube doesn't allow for requests without a valid key: They need to stay in control of their service and, naturally, want to protect it from DOS attacks. If someone does mischief with your key, you are the one who gets punished for it, usually by deactivation of the key.
We have two jira installations at our company. One that we use for our projects and a second one for testing purposes.
I'm working in a project that needs to use the JIRA REST API. For this purpose I'm connecting to our testing instance.
The problem is that while trying out the REST API, I keep getting 400 errors without a single explanation of what went wrong. I just get an HTML with
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand
I was a bit desperate and decided to try it into our real JIRA. To my surpirse the same request gave me a different response:
{"errorMessages":[],"errors":{"project":"project is required"}}
In this case, I do get a meaningful error!
I replicated this easily. I would never get a meaningful error from the test instance, but the real one will always give me one.
I cannot keep trying out stuff in our productive JIRA, but I cannot easily continue working without getting meaningful errors. So, what could be wrong in the testing instance? I could not find any configuration about the 'verbosity' of the API responses.
I believe that this error is returned not by JIRA but rather by proxy web server that is part of you production configuration.
I suggest you to compare HTTP headers that are sent with working requests from your browser with headers you pass via curl. Googling for the "Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand" helps too
Hey I'm developing an iOS application which communicates with an external web service in order to make various kinds of requests.
I'm aware of Murphy's Law "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" and that made me think about timeouts. Currently my application does not handle the situation when a request get completed and times out simultaneously. How should I handle such situations?
Without cooperation from the service provider there's not a lot you can do. If your app sees a timeout it cannot from that deduce whether the request actually completed or not. Could be it worked and something in the infrastructure failed to deliver the response, could be that it failed and hence you saw no timely response.
You have some actions you can take that will help the user. I assume that you have available to you the details of the request you attempted to send, your app should keep that locally. You are now in a position to do some useful things:
Some service authors allow you to safely submit the same request twice. So just resubmit, if it previously worked the service will just say "yep, already done that, here's the details|, if not it will just do the work as normal.
Some service authors allow you to query the status of previous request, so you can determine what has been done and what has not.
In some cases there is no IT system way to deal with the problem, the user will need to contact a help desk or call centre. Here having the details of what was previously attempted can be very useful.
How do I play a track from a SoundCloud URL, which, for example, I got from the xml response from a query
<stream-url>https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream</stream-url>
I should have thought that it would have been as easy as:
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream&client_id=my_client_id
yet I get
<error>401 - Unauthorized</error>
All I want to do is consume it in a Silverlight MediaElement, so all I need is set some url to the MediaElement's Source property.
I've checked an application that I wrote about 2 years ago, and THEN, accessing the stream url was as easy as this for a public track:
http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18163056/stream&consumer_key=MY_CONSUMER_KEY
however this no longer seems to work.
For example, all I had to do then in C# was:
MediaElement me = new MediaElement();
me.Source= new Url("http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18163056/stream&consumer_key=MY_CONSUMER_KEY");
me.Play();
Any hints would be appreciated.
I had a reply on a Microsoft forum that seems to imply that SoundCloud might not be possible to stream to Windows 8 Metro devices without consuming the whole stream before playback starts - which is quite worrying and would seem to imply that to make authentication possible, it would have to be done entirely in the url querystring insterad of using the header:
(The following reply is the answer to the following question: 'I am able to access an audio stream by http using the MediaElement, however I need to access it via https in which I need to add the oAuth info to the header of the initial request.
How is this done when using a MediaElement, and if it cannot be done, what is the workaround for consuming an audio feed in Metro 8 that requires header authentication to stream?')
"Direct access to the underlying network stream is not currently permitted by the MediaElement. Because of this there is currently no way to modify the header of the HTTP request to include any additional authentication information. That said, you do have control over the URL. You could theoretically setup an HTTP proxy service that translated the HTTP GET request parameters into the necessary oAuth credentials. Keep in mind that this is just a theoretical workaround. You may find different behavior in practice. Another theoretical workaround would be to handle the oAuth yourself via a raw stream socket and pass the retuned media data to the MediaElement via "Set Source" and a "Random Access Stream". Please keep in mind that this method has major limitations. in order to use a "Random Access Stream" with the ME you need to make sure all of the data is available before passing it to the ME."
The proxy service is not scalable for an application that is merely distributed for free as every stream would need to come via the proxy. And the raw stream socket, although getting around this, would mean that playback could not start until the whole file had downloaded - and this goes against all current UX (User Experience) guidelines.
So once again, if anyone has any tips, or info about how the whole authentication thing can be achieved in a querystring instead of using headers, I'd appreciate it!
I'm a little confused about whether you're referring to a public or a private track? If it's a public track, then you shouldn't need to send any authentication information, just your client id.
When I request https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/31164607/stream?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID then I get a 302 redirect to the proper mp3 stream.
Remember, adding parameters to a URL must start with a ? not &. This could (more than likely) be the reason why you are getting a 401 (SC is not picking up the client_id).
After authentication the link like this
http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103229681/stream?consumer_key=d61f17a08f86bfb1dea28539908bc9bf
is working fine. I am using Action Script.
I'm following up on Tom's reply because he calls attention to url character specificity. My HTTP requests randomly started failing today, and I was prefacing my client_Id with a ?. As soon as I changed that single ? to &, it started working. So in my case, SC wasn't picking up my client_Id because I used the wrong character. I think depending on where in the request we're talking about specifically, it's worth noting that differences between ? and & do make a difference.
I'm trying to use the FedEx API to track packages. I can authenticate to their test server successfully (using my user credentials, account number, and meter number). However, I receive the same unhelpful response for most tracking numbers that I use in my requests; both test tracking numbers (like 999999999999) and real tracking numbers (that work well on the FedEx website) return the following:
Error Code 9040.
No information for the following shipments has been received by our system yet. Please try again or contact Customer Service at 1.800.Go.FedEx(R) 800.463.3339.
The only requests that fetch a different response are the clearly invalid ones, like "test", which returns:
Error Code 5508.
Invalid tracking number.
I tried SOAP requests using their wsdl (TrackService_v5) as well as manual non-SOAP HTTP POST requests, but their responses are exactly the same in both cases. Is something wrong on their side, or am I doing something wrong?
It seems that FedEx has disabled any test tracking numbers, in the past 999999999999 would work just fine, but now that doesn't even work. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to resolve this is to move to production. Which IMHO is bad because you have to test the tracking part of your application until you move to production.
999999999999 worked for me, but I think I am already in production environment.