Javascript Dojo AJAX (XHR) Requests with Custom Headers in Firefox

I'm trying to make a request using dojo.xhrGet to grab some XML data from a server. I'm using dojo 1.4.0.

The server requires that I pass credentials through a custom HTTP header called Myau开发者_开发问答thtoken.

Everything works fine in Safari. The code pops up a dialog showing [object Document]. But in Firefox, the dialog shows null. Somewhere along the process, the custom header is being dropped or corrupted, and the server doesn't accept it.

The relevant code looks something like this:

dojo.xhrGet({
  url: 'https://host.com/path/to/thing?param1=one&param2=two',
  headers: {
    'Myauthtoken': 'username:password'
  },
  handleAs: 'xml',
  load: function(response) {
    alert(response);
  },
  error: function(e) {
    alert("error: " + e);
  }
});

In Firefox, Firebug displays the following Request Headers:

Host: host.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7

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

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Origin: null

Access-Control-Request-Method: GET

Access-Control-Request-Headers: myauthtoken,x-requested-with

The server responds with a 403 (Forbidden) and these Response Headers:

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:02:47 GMT

Server: Noelios-Restlet-Engine/1.0.6

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Content-Length: 337

Connection: close

Update! I've been researching, and it looks like the problem is that Firefox is attempting to preflight the request because of the custom headers, while Safari isn't, and is instead just sending the custom headers without first checking if they're valid.

I also figured out how to look at the Request in Safari:

Cache-Control: max-age=0

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Myauthtoken: username:password

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10

And the Response Headers:

Cache-Control: no-store

Connection: close

Content-Length: 236391

Content-Type: application/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1

Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:02:22 GMT

Server: Noelios-Restlet-Engine/1.0.6

The main difference being the Content-Length: 235391

Unfortunately, I'm still not much closer to actually finding a solution- still looking for some good ideas, or really any ideas at all.

Any thoughts on what's going on and how I can get around this?

Thanks!

After a bit more research, it looks like the problem is that the server is expecting the headers to be case-sensitive, while Firefox is converting the headers to lowercase.

Firefox is sending myauthtoken, while the server is expecting Myauthtoken.

In the end, it all came down to a bit of code where we were using getFirstValue(String name), which defaults to case-sensitive, instead of getFirstValue(String name, boolean ignoreCase).

Watch out for case-sensitive headers!

For custom headers, I believe you need to use the X- prefix:

X-Myauthtoken: username:password

  headers: {
    'X-Myauthtoken': 'username:password'
  },

The server will need to accept it as well, since it's a non-standard header.