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#1636 ✓invalid
Brian Johnson

RackResponse 304 output not compatible with XMLHTTPRequest spec

Reported by Brian Johnson | December 26th, 2008 @ 02:28 AM | in 2.x

This is the relevant section:

The XML response entity body is either a Document representing the response entity body or null. The XML response entity body is the return value of the following algorithm:

  1. If the response entity body is "null" terminate these steps and return null.

  2. If a Content-Type is present and it does not contain a MIME type (ignoring any parameters) that is text/xml, application/xml or ends in +xml terminate these steps and return null. (Do not terminate these steps if there is no Content-Type header at all.)

The problem is that rack_process.rb deletes the content type and sets the output to [] which returns an empty response body. Because it removes the content-type header, XMLHTTPRequest will interpret the response as text/xml. An empty string is not valid XML and will produce a "no element found" error in Firefox. It seems that the out/to_a method should set the content type to something like text/plain or return a response body of "null" for 304 status responses.

We use AJAX calls to return JSON data to a grid and would like to be able to use etags to keep the load/traffic down on the server.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Brian Johnson

    Brian Johnson December 26th, 2008 @ 11:55 PM

    Seems to also be a problem with CgiResponse. If I do something like this

    render :text => "null", :status => :not_modified, :content_type => 'text/plain'

    it still renders with an empty body and no content type

  • Pratik

    Pratik March 8th, 2009 @ 05:30 PM

    • Assigned user set to “josh”
  • josh

    josh March 10th, 2009 @ 03:15 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “invalid”

    I think Rack is doing the correct thing, but I'm not entirely sure.

    Anyway, this is something that needs to be fixed in Rack, not Rails. Please file a ticket on the Rack lighthouse. Assign the ticket to Ryan Tomayko, the HTTP caching expert.

    http://rack.lighthouseapp.com/

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