Posting XML to Rails - ruby-on-rails

I am trying to
1) post some XML to my Rails App (without using forms)
2) have my Rails App then parse the posted XML to create entries within my database
For example, I'd like to post
<transaction>
<date>12-01-2010</date>
<amount>1.00</amount>
</transaction>
<transaction>
<date>12-02-2010</date>
<amount>2.00</amount>
</transaction>
Assuming I have a transaction controller. I'd then like to create an "upload" action that would allow me to parse the snippet above and create entries within my database.
From my research it seems like 1) can be accomplished with curl. But I'm not sure if that is right, because I don't know what URI to point the curl command to.
I am also not clear how to get the XML data within the "upload" action of my controller.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you!

You have to set Header Content-type, send as POST request and then you have only worry about the XML posted content

Here is a example of how to post xml by using curl
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:text/xml" -d "<xml>Your XML Data</xml>" "http://your url"
XML parameter parser is removed in Rails 4, so if you're using Rails 4, you need to install actionpack-xml-parser gem first, refer to https://github.com/rails/actionpack-xml_parser

Related

Posting attachments to Slack API

So I just understood that the Slack Web API does not support JSON data over POST. Which means I have to encode my complex and nested JSON object to fit in query parameters over GET. Problem is, the attachements don't seem to work. Does anyone have a solution ?
So I just understood that the Slack Web API does not support JSON data over POST. Which means I have to encode my complex and nested JSON object to fit in query parameters over GET.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean. You can certainly use POST. The body of a Slack API call should be form-encoded, but parameter values are sometimes JSON (as is the case for attachments).
Here's a working curl command that uses HTTP POST to post a message with a simple attachment.
$ curl -d token=<REDACTED> -d channel=<REDACTED> \
-d text="This is the main text." \
-d attachments='[{"text": "This is an attachment."}]' \
https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage
I'd recommend using POST, but GET also works fine. If you fill in the values in https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.postMessage/test, the tool will give you a URL at the bottom that you can use with HTTP GET.

How to POST JSON in body for functional tests in Symfony 1.4

I'm writing some functional tests for a POST API endpoint. I've reviewed the documentation and can't find a way to add content to the POST body. The post method for sfBrowser:
post('some url',array('x'=>'y'))
Only creates POST parameters (in this case x=y). Is there anyway of adding content to the post body using sfBrowser?
From what I have found here, here and here, the POST format takes parameter:value format, so you can send your JSON with some code like:
post('some url', array('json_data' => json_encode($toJson))
and then decode in your action with
$jsonObj = json_decode($request->getParameter('json_data'));
but you need to associate your JSON data with a parameter name in your POST to retrieve it on the server side.
As a side note, after looking at the Symfony code, the parameters are given straight to $_POST except for CSRF, which is tweaked.

How to keep Rails from Processing Large XML Post

In our rails application we have a many actions that do regular webapp actions. But, we have a single action that accepts a large XML file. I would like to keep rails from parsing the XML into params. Instead, I would like to be able to get the URL params ( /documents/{id}/action ) and then write out the xml file to a specific directory. How do I keep Rails from processing it?
How would I define the action to handle this?
def handle_xml
# what to put here
end
The upload is done using Content-Type: application/xml It is a single file, and not part of a multipart form. The sample curl statement would be:
curl-H 'Accept: application/xml' -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' -X POST -d '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><test></test>' http://0.0.0.0:3000/controller/handle_xml
If you want to prevent rails from automatically parsing the XML data into a hash of parameters, you'll have to replace the ParamsParser middleware with your own custom version.
When a file is posted to rails, the ParamsParser middleware modifies the request parameters and turns it into a Hash if the data format is xml. You can find the details in the params_parser.rb file in rails.
Here's a RoR mailing list message similar to the question that you've asked
Unfortunately, as a new user I can't post any more links, but you should search google with "Sanitizing POST params with custom Rack middleware" for some more details on writing custom rack middleware.
I too have come across this problem recently. However mine is in an internal application where I have full control over both the Rails app and the clients connecting to it.
In my app the client POSTs a large XML data set to the Rails app. I wanted to process the XML document in a delayed job (resque). My workaround was to make the client use an alternate content-type. I used application/octet-stream. This prevents Rails from parsing the POST data. The data is available in request.raw_post.
The action should receive it as a file (through way of multipart form upload) and then store it as a temporary file for you.
Have you tried sending the xml file has one variable in the http uri request? So something like
#xml_file = xml..xml...xml...
parameters => {
query => {
xml_file => #xml_file
}
}
Httparty.post("url", parameters)
Then in your method:
def handle_xml
#xml_file = params[:xml_file]
#xml_file.save (or whatever you want here..)
end

Rails Paperclip XML POST File

I am able to 'POST' to a Rails application (with Paperclip) using XML instead of the standard web form (trying to do it from another Ruby script). However, I would like to include a binary file.
Is there any way to include the binary data within an XML tag? Or can I do something like B64 encode the data on the client and then decode it before it hits the Paperclip plugin?
UPDATE:
The browser sends a POST with this data (among others):
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="upload[upload]"; filename="foo.jpg"
Content-Type: image/jpeg
ÿØÿà�JFIF��`�`��ÿþ�Created by AccuSoft Corp.ÿÛ�C�...
I'd like to replicate that, but within XML
The short version is: use type="file", base64-encode the file, and put it inside a CDATA block. I originally found an explanation at this link:
http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2010/02/15/restful-uploading-of-files-using-xml/
That link appears to have died, so I recommend checking out the Internet Archive copy of the blog post:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100825030057/http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2010/02/15/restful-uploading-of-files-using-xml/
Also linked from that post is a gem that implements an encoder for files posted to Rails as XML: https://github.com/nragaz/encoded_attachment

Load testing multipart form

I'm trying to load-test a Rails application using JMeter. A critical part of the application involves a form that includes both text inputs and file uploads. It works fine in a browser, but when I try to post that page in JMeter, Rails is saving all of the parts of the multipart form as temp files, which causes things to break when it's looking for a string and gets a tempfile instead.
It appears that the difference is that, from a browser, the piece of the multipart request that contains a text input looks like this:
-----------------------------7d93b4186074c
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field_name"
test
-----------------------------7d93b4186074c
while from JMeter it looks like this:
-----------------------------7d159c1302d0y0
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field_name"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
test
-----------------------------7d159c1302d0y0
So apparently Rails sees the former and interprets it as a plain text value and treats it as a string, but sees the latter and saves it to a temp file.
I have not been able to find a setting to convince JMeter not to send the additional headers in the multipart form for non-file fields.
Is there a way to convince Rails to ignore those headers and treat the text/plain text as strings instead of text files? Or a quick way to put a filter in front of my controller that will strip the extra headers?
Alternately, is there a better tool to load-test a Rails application that includes file upload?
Turns out these days you can just tick "use browser compatible headers" in JMeter. Could've saved myself a hell of a lot of time there :-)
So, I have customized JMeter's multipart request posting part in the source code to put out the request that rails understand. The change is easy as shown below but to create compiling Java/JMeter environment took time. :(
Anyways, now I can successfully upload a file by multipart post via JMeter.
in src/protocol/http/org/apache/jmeter/protocol/http/sampler/PostWriter.java
writeStartFileMultipart()
//writeln(out, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary"); // $NON-NLS-1$
writeFormMultipart()
/*****
writeln(out, "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=" + charSet); // $NON-NLS-1$
writeln(out, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit"); // $NON-NLS-1$
*****/
P.S.
A tip tip to create the build environment for 2.4 is
to comment out the 3rd party libraries check in build.xml file.
copy lib/xstream-1.3.1.jar from binary archive into lib/ directory
There may be a better way, but I ended up adding a quick filter to turn the text/plain tempfiles into strings within the parameter hash:
def change_text_files_to_strings
params.each_pair do |key, value|
params[key] = value.read if (value.class.to_s=='Tempfile' && value.content_type.start_with?('text/plain') )
end
end
By the way, it turns out that jmeter is correct here, and rails incorrect: according to RFC 2388, each item in a multipart request should have a content type (not just files), so Rails really shouldn't be using the presence of a content-type header to determine whether it's a file. Ah well.
I also used the solution above as ColdFusion was sending similar headers (minus the Content-Transfer-Encoding) with each piece of form data. I wonder if there's a better way.
EDIT: Anyone know if this has been fixed in Rails 3?
What kind of error do you get? Something like
NoMethodError (undefined method `rewind' for "1":String):
There is an issue with Rack that could explain your problem. See https://github.com/rack/rack/issuesearch?state=open&q=rewind#issue/116
We were also having a similar issue, In addition to the above answers we also correlate the X-CSRF-Token of HTTP Header Manager in that request and were
successfully able to upload the required media as many as times we wanted.

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