urlConnection and request headers

General
1

This is more of a question about Xojo functionality than a bug question, since I have got a work-around to my issue. But here goes.

I have been using urlConnection for a while in several of my programs in order to retrieve data from a RESTful api. Everything was working fine until the server behind the api was “upgraded”. Then my programs stopped working - reported 401 errors for accounts that were unchanged and previously working fine.

After a lot of messing about I found an earlier forum post (Unable to access a password protected page - #5 by Brian_Lillard) that gave me a work-around. It looks like the authentication attempt fails unless I manually set the authorization request header to Basic with something like this:

Authenticator.RequestHeader("Authorization") = "Basic " + EncodeBase64(txtAuthName.text + ":" + txtAuthPassword.text)

The new version of the server software now expects OAuth authentication unless I specify Basic, which is presumably the reason that my programs work if I add that line of code above. It leaves me with a question, though. If I don’t specify Basic authentication, what does urlConnect use? Does it concatenate and encode the username and password anyway, but just not set the request header? Or something different? I couldn’t see anything in the documentation for urlConnection.

2

If the server requests Basic HTTP Authentication, the AuthenticationRequested event is supposed to occur where you would handle it. Any other type of authentication you’ll have to set up yourself.

If I recall correctly, at one point there was an issue with the event being raised and one would have to form the URL to do the authentication instead. I do not know if that is still true.