[Archivesspace_Users_Group] ArchivesSpace API and XMLHttpRequests

Fri Feb 27 11:51:14 EST 2015

Hi,
Just looping back around on this thread to close out a couple of issues.
First, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the 403 error I was getting on the search was because I was not actually authenticated as an admin user. Oops…
Second, in regards to resolve the cross domain request issues in a production environment, it seems like there are basically two ways to do this:

 1.  Set up a proxy in front of the backend, as Brian suggested.
 2.  Make some changes to the core AS code to include a gem to handle CORS [1] [2]

At the moment we don’t have a pressing need to resolve the cross-origin issue, but if/when we do I’ll write something up on how we did it and circulate.

1 https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors
2 https://github.com/britg/sinatra-cross_origin

Hillel Arnold
Lead Digital Archivist
Rockefeller Archive Center

From: <Arnold>, Hillel Arnold <harnold at rockarch.org<mailto:harnold at rockarch.org>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Friday, February 13, 2015 at 12:02 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] ArchivesSpace API and XMLHttpRequests

Hi Nathan,
I don’t have a good answer to that question other than that I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.
To follow up on the issue I was experiencing with a permissions error for certain API requests, it seems very likely this is a server configuration thing on our end. I’m able to successfully make those calls when running AS on my local machine. I’ll reply back to this list when I’ve figured both that and the CORS issue out.
Brian – thanks for sending the demo. Your client library is super helpful, and I hope will continue to see development/release at some point. If there’s anything I can do to help make that happen, let me know!

Hillel

From: Nathan Stevens <ns96 at nyu.edu<mailto:ns96 at nyu.edu>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 3:29 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] ArchivesSpace API and XMLHttpRequests

Besides the elegance of using a pure javascript/html solution you ever consider just using a simple php script to wrap all the calls to the aspace backend since you already planning on deploying on Apache anyway?

On Feb 11, 2015 6:24 PM, "Brian Hoffman" <brianjhoffman at gmail.com<mailto:brianjhoffman at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi Hillel,

If you are using Apache to server the index of your SPA app, your best bet might be to use ProxyPass statements in your Apache config to get around the X-domain issues. Example:

http://yourserver.edu/spa/index.html

http://yourserver.edu/aspaceproxy

which proxies and reverse proxies to:

http://youraspaceserver.edu

Disclaimer: this isn't really something I have a lot of experience with.

Regarding the authentication, I threw together a little demo using a client library I wrote - maybe it will help:

https://github.com/quoideneuf/asapi/releases/tag/spa-demo

Brian

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 10:16 AM, Arnold, Hillel <harnold at rockarch.org<mailto:harnold at rockarch.org>> wrote:
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your quick response, and for the tip about Chrome. I was able to sidestep the cross-domain issue for now, but if anyone has tips on how to get this working in production that would be great to know for the future. I should mention that I tried changing the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in Apache, but that didn’t seem to have any effect because ArchivesSpace is running within Jetty (I think).
As far as getting something back via a URL like /search?q=query&page=1, I am still having no luck. I was able to successfully authenticate (and I’m authenticating as an admin user), and am sending the session key back via a header. I’m able to successfully make other calls, but that particular one is not working. Any ideas?

Hillel

From: Brian Hoffman <brianjhoffman at gmail.com<mailto:brianjhoffman at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 10:19 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] ArchivesSpace API and XMLHttpRequests

Hi Hillel,

For development purposes, you can get around the cross domain issue by starting Chrome with the disable-web-security flag:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3102819/disable-same-origin-policy-in-chrome

For the Postman case you described, it sounds like you need to hit the login endpoint first, get back the session key, and then add that to your search request headers (there's a little dropdown in Postman for this) using 'X-ArchivesSpace-Session' as the header key.

Hope this helps,

Brian

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Arnold, Hillel <harnold at rockarch.org<mailto:harnold at rockarch.org>> wrote:
Hi everyone,
I’ve been hacking together a proof-of-concept single page web app which makes a couple of API calls against ArchivesSpace and returns/displays a bunch of data about a particular archival component.
Because I am not really a programmer, I’m just making a XMLHttpRequest with JQuery. However, I’m running into a couple problems.
First, when I try to post to my username and password so I can get back a session token, I’m getting an error related to cross domain requesting saying the requested resource doesn’t have an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header set. It seems like I’d need to set those header somewhere server-side (maybe in the app config settings somewhere), but I’m not sure where exactly that would be. The existing examples out there for working with the ArchivesSpace API seem to mostly be command-line tools, which wasn’t really helping me. I’m sure there are people out there who have done this, either specifically with ArchivesSpace or with other Ruby apps, so if you know how to do this or can point me to a link which tells me how to do it, I’d be most grateful!
Second, unless I am reading the documentation wrong (which is very likely), I think I should be able to make a get request like:
http://some_url:8089/search?q=cats&page=1 and get back search results. However, when I test that URL out in Postman I’m getting a 403 error. Am I missing something here?

Thanks for any help!

Hillel Arnold
Lead Digital Archivist
Rockefeller Archive Center

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