Google Contacts API: Unauthorized 401 Unknown authorization header

Question

I have carefully read Google Contacts API documentation, but I can't get PUT requests (i.e. updates) right. I'm using Ruby on Rails 3.2 with OAuth gem (v0.4.5). I fetch tokens with Omniauth and the scope is defined as "https://www.google.com/m8/feeds"

Let me demonstrate:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > @access_token.get("https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full/c1f86b48b52548c", {"GData-Version" => "3.0"})
=> #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>

As you can see, GET requests work nicely so my OAuth access token should be alright. DELETE requests work, too:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > @access_token.delete('https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full/c1f86b48b52548c', { 'GData-Version' => '3.0', 'If-Match' => '"RH46fTVSLyt7I2A9Wx9VFkgMQAU."' })
 => #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>

So far, so good. Here I provided the contact entry's Etag in the request header as instructed in Google's documentation [1]. So it shouldn't be causing any trouble.

According to the OAuth gem documentation [2] the syntax of a PUT request should be like following:

- (Object) put(path, body = '', headers = {})

And an example from the documentation:

@token.put('/people/123', @person.to_xml, { 'Accept' => 'application/xml', 'Content-Type' => 'application/xml' })

As far as I understand, I should be sending a simple XML string as the body of the PUT request. So let's fetch some example data first:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :003 > xmldata = @access_token.get("https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full/5f74bf0d5c621a", {"GData-Version" => "3.0"}).body

=> "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
      <entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:gContact='http://schemas.google.com/contact/2008' xmlns:batch='http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batch' xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005' gd:etag='&quot;R3w4fzVSLit7I2A9WhRaGEQCQgc.&quot;'>
        <id>http://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/base/5f74bf0d5c621a</id>
        <updated>2012-02-22T08:15:36.237Z</updated>
        <app:edited xmlns:app='http://www.w3.org/2007/app'>2012-02-22T08:15:36.237Z</app:edited>
        <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind' term='http://schemas.google.com/contact/2008#contact'/>
        <title>Joe Average</title>
        <link rel='http://schemas.google.com/contacts/2008/rel#photo' type='image/*' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/photos/media/my.email%40address.com/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
        <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/full/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
        <link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/full/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
        <gd:name>
          <gd:fullName>Joe Average</gd:fullName>
          <gd:givenName>Joe</gd:givenName>
          <gd:familyName>Average</gd:familyName>
        </gd:name>
        <gd:email rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#other' address='[email protected]' primary='true'/>
      </entry>"

... and try to update it back to Google:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :004 > @access_token.put("https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full/5f74bf0d5c621a", xmldata, {"GData-Version" => "3.0", 'If-Match' => '"R3w4fzVSLit7I2A9WhRaGEQCQgc."'})

=> #<Net::HTTPUnauthorized 401 Unknown authorization header readbody=true>

So this doesn't work. Let's try to strip down the XML a little so it'll look just like in documentation [1]:

xmldata = "<entry gd:etag='&quot;R3w4fzVSLit7I2A9WhRaGEQCQgc.&quot;'>
             <id>http://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/base/5f74bf0d5c621a</id>
             <updated>2012-02-22T08:15:36.237Z</updated>
             <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind' term='http://schemas.google.com/contact/2008#contact'/>
             <link rel='http://schemas.google.com/contacts/2008/rel#photo' type='image/*' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/photos/media/my.email%40address.com/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
             <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/full/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
             <link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/my.email%40address.com/full/5f74bf0d5c621a?v=3.0'/>
             <gd:name>
               <gd:fullName>Joe Average</gd:fullName>
               <gd:givenName>Joe</gd:givenName>
               <gd:familyName>Average</gd:familyName>
             </gd:name>
             <gd:email rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#other' address='[email protected]' primary='true'/>
           </entry>"

But no luck, exactly the same error as before.

This is where I'm totally stuck now. I would greatly appreciate any hints to right direction.

[1] https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/#updating_contacts

[2] http://rubydoc.info/gems/oauth/0.4.5/OAuth/AccessToken

You might try formatting the request in a file and then make the request with curl to see if you can rule out some of the magic that may be happening. One thing that pops out as a possibility is that some things may have been encoded (e.g. ") that shouldn't be. — Tom Harrison

cortfr cortfr · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-11T23:41:52

Try setting your Content-Type header to 'application/atom+xml' in your PUT request. I was having a similar problem and doing that helped.

Google Contacts API: Unauthorized 401 Unknown authorization header

2 Answers