jquery $.ajax custom http headers issue

7
votes

I'm querying a REST webservice which uses custom http headers for authentication.

If I perform a POST without the headers I'm getting the expected error, but when I add the headers I get a 404 error instead of what I actually need.

This is my code

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: 'http://server.com/service',
  beforeSend: function (xhr) { xhr.setRequestHeader('CUSTOM-HEADER-KEY', 'CUSTOM-HEADER-VALUE') },
  success: function(data) {    
    alert('success.');
  }
});

Here's the firebug headers output:

OPTIONS /service HTTP/1.1 Host: server.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1 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 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Connection: keep-alive Origin: null Access-Control-Request-Method: POST Access-Control-Request-Headers: custom-header-key Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache

and the smae headers when performing the post with poster, which returns desired result.

POST /service HTTP/1.1 Host: server.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1 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 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Connection: keep-alive CUSTOM-HEADER-KEY: CUSTOM-HEADER-VALUE Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Length: 0

The difference is pretty obvious, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong in the jquery code.

Could anyone help me please?

4
jqueryajaxpostheader
Are you sending this POST request across servers? – Blender
Blender is on the right track. This is most likely a sandbox violation. Either access the service VIA jsonp or use your server as a proxy to the service. – John
"and the smae headers when performing the post with poster".. what is "POSTER" ? – humblelistener

4 Answers

5
votes

In a cross domain request if the header is not allowed by the service browser will simply remove it

At first browser browser will make an OPTION call to check for the allowed (Origin, Headers, Methods)

In your service configuration you have to allow the header in order to be able to send it to server using

Access-Control-Allow-Headers: YOUR_HEADER_NAME
2
votes

This is a Cross domain request. So you cannot solve it from browser side. You might need a Server Side Proxy to perform POST to a different domain.

1
votes

This may or may not help but I think you can add the headers in the data option:

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  data: put the results of your header request here,
  url: 'http://server.com/service',
  beforeSend: function (xhr) { xhr.setRequestHeader('CUSTOM-HEADER-KEY', 'CUSTOM-HEADER-VALUE') },
  success: function(data) {    
    alert('success.');
  }
});
1
votes

Any custom headers on cross domain calls triggers a pre-flight request which is an OPTIONS call. You need to either bypass security check for OPTIONS calls or handle the requests separately since the custom headers are not passed with the OPTIONS request. Also there is no harm in allowing pre-flight request since no actual data is passed back to the browser with that call. Basically the browser asks to the server if it is allowed to make that call before actually making it. You might need to check your Access-Control headers too. All these changes are on the server side btw so you need to have full control over the webservice.