iPhone POST request is always seen as GET by $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] in PHP

Question

I'm doing a project on an iPhone. Here I have to send a POST request to a web service. I use a NSMutableURLRequest and a NSURLConnection to send the data, and the server uses PHP. I have found that the check if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != "POST") always fails, as in returns 'GET', even when I try it on localhost.

My POST request looks as follows (sniffed via Wireshark):

POST tester.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://localhost/tester.php
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 422

protocol=4&msgtype=authorize&merchant=86189919&language=da&ordernumber=1274168351&amount=100&currency=DKK&continueurl=http%3A%2F%2Fquickpay.net%2Ffeatures%2Fpayment-window%2Fok.php&cancelurl=http%3A%2F%2Fquickpay.net%2Ffeatures%2Fpayment-window%2Ferror.php&callbackurl=http%3A%2F%2Fquickpay.net%2Ffeatures%2Fpayment-window%2Fcallback.php&autocapture=0&cardtypelock=&splitpayment=1&md5check=d2259d9db077e0f5a41b4bf271c3c549

Of course there is a lot dummy text in there, that would normally not be there from a iPhone, but I have tried to make the same call via a html form, and that worked. Therefore I have copied all the information over to see if that would make a difference, but to no avail.

I have compared the two requests (one from the iPhone, the other from my php page) and they look exactly the same.

I'm flabbergasted - does anyone have a good advice on what to do?

Edit:

Your test isn't testing for post or post vs get, it is testing for POST specifically, you could have a case issue there... Have you tried inspecting the request itself in php? – Grady Player

Yes, that could be true, but the line always returns GET, so the case issue is covered, if that's what you mean.

Also, please post the result of print_r($_SERVER) from the server when the iPhone sends the request – Aleks G

Array( HTTP_HOST => 10.11.105.254 HTTP_USER_AGENT => Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone Simulator; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9B176 HTTP_ACCEPT => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE => en-us HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING => gzip, deflate HTTP_CONNECTION => keep-alive PATH => /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin SERVER_SIGNATURE => Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.8 with Suhosin-Patch Server at 10.11.105.254 Port 80 SERVER_SOFTWARE => Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.8 with Suhosin-Patch SERVER_NAME => 10.11.105.254 SERVER_ADDR => 10.11.105.254 SERVER_PORT => 80 REMOTE_ADDR => 10.11.105.254 DOCUMENT_ROOT => /Library/WebServer/Documents SERVER_ADMIN => [email protected] SCRIPT_FILENAME => /Users/tester.php REMOTE_PORT => 51492 GATEWAY_INTERFACE => CGI/1.1 SERVER_PROTOCOL => HTTP/1.1 REQUEST_METHOD => GET QUERY_STRING => REQUEST_URI => /tester.php SCRIPT_NAME => /tester.php PHP_SELF => /tester.php REQUEST_TIME => 1334211212 argv => Array argc => 0 )

Did you try checking to see if a known variable, e.g. $_POST['known_to_be_set_by_client'] is set or not? It's not PHP that figures out if a request is POST or GET, it's the web server. – Tim Post

When I try to echo a known variable from the iPhone request, it is of course empty. Which makes sense. When I echo the same thing from the form it is there.

Post the iOS code your using to make the actual request. – Cliff Ribaudo

Here is the code that creates the request and sends it:

//variables
NSString *protocol = @"4";
NSString *msgtype = @"authorize";
NSString *merchant = @"86189919";
NSString *language = @"da";
NSString *orderNo = @"1274168351";
NSString *amount = @"100";
NSString *currency = @"DKK";
NSString *continueURL = @"http://quickpay.net/features/payment-window/ok.php";
NSString *cancelURL = @"http://quickpay.net/features/payment-window/error.php";
NSString *callbackURL = @"http://quickpay.net/features/payment-window/callback.php";
NSString *autoCapture = @"0";
NSString *cardtypeLock =@"";
NSString *splitText = @"1";
NSString *md5check = @"d2259d9db077e0f5a41b4bf271c3c549";

//setting up the request
NSMutableString *post = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:@"protocol="];
[post appendString:protocol];

[post appendString:@"&msgtype="];
[post appendString:msgtype];

[post appendString:@"&merchant="];
[post appendString:merchant];

[post appendString:@"&language="];
[post appendString:language];

[post appendString:@"&ordernumber="];
[post appendString:orderNo];

[post appendString:@"&amount="];
[post appendString:amount];

[post appendString:@"&currency="];
[post appendString:currency];

[post appendString:@"&continueurl="];
[post appendString:continueURL];

[post appendString:@"&cancelurl="];
[post appendString:cancelURL];

[post appendString:@"&callbackurl="];
[post appendString:callbackURL];

[post appendString:@"&autocapture="];
[post appendString:autoCapture];

[post appendString:@"&cardtypelock="];
[post appendString:cardtypeLock];

[post appendString:@"&splitpayment="];
[post appendString:splitText];

[post appendString:@"&md5check="];
[post appendString:md5check];


//escape characters
NSString *tmp = (__bridge NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
                                        NULL, 
                                        (__bridge CFStringRef)post, 
                                        NULL, 
                                        (CFStringRef)@";/:@+$,~", 
                                        kCFStringEncodingUTF8
                                        );


NSData *body = [tmp dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
//setup url
NSString *urlString =@"http://10.10.225.255/tester.php";
NSURL *quickUrl = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];

//setup URL request
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc]init];
//method
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
//url
[request setURL:url];

//body data to string
NSString *strData = [[NSString alloc]initWithData:body encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

//content length
NSString *postLenght = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [body length]];

//set body
[request setHTTPBody:body];

//Dummy data to make the request look like the same from the HTML form.
[request setValue:@"localhost" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Host"];
[request setValue:@"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2" forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
[request setValue:@"text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Accept"];
[request setValue:@"en-us,en;q=0.5" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Accept-Language"];
[request setValue:@"gzip, deflate" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Accept-Encoding"];
[request setValue:@"http://localhost/tester.php" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Referer"];
[request setValue:@"application/x-www-form-urlencoded" forHTTPHeaderField:@"content-type"];
[request setValue:postLenght forHTTPHeaderField:@"content-length"];

//send the request to server
if([[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self]){
    NSLog(@"sending data to quickpay"); 
} 

Answer 1

(This is more a comment than an answer) If

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != "POST")

always fails (as you write in your question), this must mean that:

$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST"

So either you have asked the wrong question, or you are not properly validating input values. Please add the output of var_dump($_SERVER) to your question.

Answer 2

I figured it out. As expected, it was an oversight by myself! When I loaded to url into the UIWebView, in the delegate, I used the loadRequest method, which of course uses a GET request to return the content. Instead I should have used the loadHTMLString:baseURL: method instead to load the returned data. This error meant that the app issued another GET request after my initial POST, which caused the error. Obviously I didn't notice this extra request for a looong time.