JSON-ing and request headers

We have this web widget that calls a particular webservice and does a JSON post. This was failing miserably on the back-end. For some reason, the data that was ending up in the session was not ending up in $session->params->{POSTDATA} but instead $session->params->{keywords}. In turn, our webservice was bombing when it was trying to access the data from POSTDATA since it wasn’t there in the session. Here’s an excerpt of the Perl data dump for the bad session:

_QUERY       => bless({
                      ".charset"     => "ISO-8859-1",
                      ".cookies"     => {
                                          sid => bless({
                                                   name  => "sid",
                                                   path  => "/",
                                                   value => ["XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"],
                                                 }, "CGI::Cookie"),
                                        },
                      ".fieldnames"  => {},
                      ".parameters"  => ["keywords"],
                      "escape"       => 1,
                      "param"        => {
                                          keywords => [
                                            "{\"fname\":\"Steve\",\"lname\":\"Dickinson\",\"phone\":\"5557771000\",\"email\":\"steve\@someplace.com\",\"date\":\"2014-07-05\",\"time\":\"18:00:00\",\"size\":2,\"notes\":\"notes\"}",
                                          ],
                                        },
                      "use_tempfile" => 1,
                    }, "CGI"),
    _STATUS      => 5,
  }, "CGI::Session");

It should have instead looked like this:

_QUERY       => bless({
                      ".charset"     => "ISO-8859-1",
                      ".cookies"     => {
                                          sid => bless({
                                                   name  => "sid",
                                                   path  => "/",
                                                   value => ["XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"],
                                                 }, "CGI::Cookie"),
                                        },
                      ".fieldnames"  => {},
                      ".parameters"  => ["keywords"],
                      "escape"       => 1,
                      "param"        => {
                                          POSTDATA => [
                                            "{\"fname\":\"Steve\",\"lname\":\"Dickinson\",\"phone\":\"5557771000\",\"email\":\"steve\@someplace.com\",\"date\":\"2014-07-05\",\"time\":\"18:00:00\",\"size\":2,\"notes\":\"notes\"}",
                                          ],
                                        },
                      "use_tempfile" => 1,
                    }, "CGI"),
    _STATUS      => 5,
  }, "CGI::Session");

During this time I was also building a similar Android app to mimic how this widget works. The funny thing was, that the Android app worked but the widget didn’t. In thinking back to my app code I soon realized the issue. In the app code I had correctly set the header like so:

httppost.setHeader("Accept", "application/json");
httppost.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");

The widget had no such code for this webservice call. So I added the following handleAs & headers definitions to the developer’s JavaScript code:

var req = {
    data: JSON.stringify(requestData),
        handleAs: 'json',
        headers: {
            "Accept": "application/json",
            "Content-Type": "application/json"
            }
    };
request.post('http://somedomain.com/webservice_call', req).then(

That’s all it took!

FreeBSD update broke Apache perl modules

After a recent freebsd update fetch && freebsd update install Apache would not restart properly. It was complaining about missing perl modules it relied on. So we rebuilt the perl port and all its dependencies.

sudo portmaster -m BATCH=yes --no-confirm -D -r perl

The -m BATCH=yes chooses defaults at setup screens and bypasses them, --no-confirm avoids prompting at the command line, -D keeps distfiles in tact and -r updates all its port dependencies. Once this was done Apache fired right up!