Rails - Jul 2010 - Unexpected behavior with respond_to

Hi all,

I am encountering some unexpected behavior in the Rails 3.0.0.rc which
I think may be incorrect.

In my controller, I have the following:

  class FeedsController < ApplicationController
    def recent
      respond_to do |format|
        format.atom
      end
    end
  end

Likewise, I have a view (feeds/recent.atom.builder):

  xml.tag!(''feed'', :xmlns =>
"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom") do
    xml.text!("...")
  end

and I have a route:

  match(''feeds/recent''  =>
''feeds#recent'')

If I try to fetch this with no Accept header, I get a 406 error:

  $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept:"
  HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
  [ ... ]

This is probably not correct, since RFC 2616 (sec 14.1) reads:

| If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the
| client accepts all media types.

Moving on.

If I try to fetch this with an "Accept: */*" header or "Accept:
application/atom+xml", it works as expected. Likewise all works well
if I use an "Accept: */*, text/html" header

However, if I change the order of the formats, to "Accept: text/html,
*/*", I get a 406:

  $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept: text/html,
*/*"
  HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
  [ ... ]

But a "text/html, */*" Accept header should be equivalent to a
"*/*,
text/html" header, since order does not matter. (This is a contrived,
but similar Accept headers are used by Firefox, with q values.)

Getting further into the bowels of RFC 2616, an "Accept:
application/*" header gives me a 406, when it should be acceptable,
because I have a response of type "application/atom+xml".

One final thing. I add a format.any entry to the controller (I am not
entirely sure the meaning of this):

  def recent
    respond_to do |format|
      format.atom
      format.any
    end
  end

And now I get a 200 with "Accept: */*" and "Accept:
application/atom+xml", but template errors with any other Accept
header including a "*/*".

Does anybody have any thoughts about this? It does not seem to me that
Rails is not doing the right thing here.

best, Erik Hetzner

Sent from my free software system <http://fsf.org/>.

I have similar issues with some js.rjs files after upgrading an app to rails
3. Some respond_to blocks keep working fine as before and I get JS returned,
some keep trying to return HTML and thus spit out the 406 error. I
haven''t
found any good reason in my code to justify this kind of behavior, even
after i tried reducing the affected js.rjs files to a simple straightforward
single line of code: I still get them returned as html with error 406. I
even tried to enforce javascript headers by putting:  format.js {render
:content_type => ''text/javascript''} in the respond_to
block, but that didn''t
change it.
Really stuck on this issue. In 2.3.8 the code worked perfectly fine.

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 12:14 AM, Erik Hetzner
<erik.hetzner-E+UK2YCIb7A@public.gmane.org>wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am encountering some unexpected behavior in the Rails 3.0.0.rc which
> I think may be incorrect.
>
> In my controller, I have the following:
>
>  class FeedsController < ApplicationController
>    def recent
>      respond_to do |format|
>        format.atom
>      end
>    end
>  end
>
> Likewise, I have a view (feeds/recent.atom.builder):
>
>  xml.tag!(''feed'', :xmlns =>
"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom") do
>    xml.text!("...")
>  end
>
> and I have a route:
>
>  match(''feeds/recent''  =>
''feeds#recent'')
>
> If I try to fetch this with no Accept header, I get a 406 error:
>
>  $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept:"
>  HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
>  [ ... ]
>
> This is probably not correct, since RFC 2616 (sec 14.1) reads:
>
> | If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the
> | client accepts all media types.
>
> Moving on.
>
> If I try to fetch this with an "Accept: */*" header or
"Accept:
> application/atom+xml", it works as expected. Likewise all works well
> if I use an "Accept: */*, text/html" header
>
> However, if I change the order of the formats, to "Accept: text/html,
> */*", I get a 406:
>
>  $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept: text/html,
*/*"
>  HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
>  [ ... ]
>
> But a "text/html, */*" Accept header should be equivalent to a
"*/*,
> text/html" header, since order does not matter. (This is a contrived,
> but similar Accept headers are used by Firefox, with q values.)
>
> Getting further into the bowels of RFC 2616, an "Accept:
> application/*" header gives me a 406, when it should be acceptable,
> because I have a response of type "application/atom+xml".
>
> One final thing. I add a format.any entry to the controller (I am not
> entirely sure the meaning of this):
>
>  def recent
>    respond_to do |format|
>      format.atom
>      format.any
>    end
>  end
>
> And now I get a 200 with "Accept: */*" and "Accept:
> application/atom+xml", but template errors with any other Accept
> header including a "*/*".
>
> Does anybody have any thoughts about this? It does not seem to me that
> Rails is not doing the right thing here.
>
> best, Erik Hetzner
>
> Sent from my free software system <http://fsf.org/>.
>
>
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