I'm kind of new to Rails 4. Right now, I'm using both strong params and "normal" params. By normal params I mean the params[:key] which is not permitted.
For example:
Strong params:
def person_params
params.require(:person).permit(:name, :age)
end
And I use both person_params[:name] and params[:key]. Is this going to be problems in the future? what should I do.
You should always use Strong Parameters.
Strong params was created to avoid the issue of Mass Assignment.
This means that if you directly use your params hash, you run into the risk of someone sending a request with parameters they aren't supposed to use and successfully overwrite them in your models.
This means that, for example, someone could gain admin privileges on your site from their "settings" page by maliciously crafting a request that modifies a hypothetical admin attributes in your User model.
Using strong params gives you the guarantee that only the parameters explicitly allowed by you will pass through to the model, so no attacker should be able to bend your application's restrictions.
Related
So I have done a lot of research and could not find a proper answer. This might be a bit long post so sorry for that. I am making a backend API using golang. I am using gingonic for routing and api stuffs.
There are 2 part of the service. Application and user. When lets say createAccount endpoint is called from the other micro service, it need to pass the user information and application token in body. Each application is like micro service that is registered to this micro service that I am building and have a unique token. If the token they pass matches then I will get the id of that row and use that to create an entry in user table which will have the id associate with it.
Now for every API call to this micro service, it is important that they are sending the valid token and that row id is needed to do all sort of functionality like login user, edit user info and so on as the each user is connected with that app id by foreign key. Currently, I wrote a middleware and when any api call is made I get row id and save it to a global variable and then when necessary I am using it in any part of the codebase.
Lets say if 5 multiple API call is made, will that global variable information will be persisted or for each call its brand new value? If it is persisted then what can I do to achieve the brand new of Global variable for every API call or if there are better approach can you please recommend it?
A global variable is not the answer here. It will be overwritten by each request as you suspected. Instead, the typical way to handle this situation is to have a context object that is created within the scope of the HTTP Request and passed to each method that requires knowledge of that context.
One basic rule is to AVOID using the global variables, it is bad practices, you cannot manage the state and you are limited for testing and concurrency using.
In my mind come two basic solutions:
Use context for this. In your handler, add the value in context and propagate this context by all your service calls. It is also useful for tracing if you are working with microservices, then you also should take a look for this. And in the place where you need the value from your global variable, do simple call: ctx.Value(YOUR_KEY) Take a look at the end of the page, you shouldn't use string as the key to context values.
You can wrap your data in the struct with this variable value. For example:
type CreateReq struct {
Token string // value from global variable
User user
}
and use this Token in your services.
When you want to delete an item from the db, I know that you can use /resource/{id} and use the contrller#destroy action.
What is the advantage of passing a parameter in the URL as oppose to send a DELETE request and pass the parameter $id via an Input?
You can certainly do both, but the first method (using the dedicated /resource/{id} URL) is following the RESTFUL design pattern. Here is a very good video on that.
To highlight some important points:
We avoid verbs in URLs, unless they're used for very specific actions. We should try to use nouns instead if it's possible, so a url like /resource/deleteis not advisable.
When someone used to the REST way of communicating with an API uses 'DELETE' on the /resource url, he/she expects to delete ALL resources. If he/she uses it on /resource/{id}, then only that specific item should be removed.
Hope this made sense =)
I'm just getting started with Apiary and I can't tell if this is a limitation of the product or just me not understanding what to do.
I'm documenting an API which authenticates the user as part of every request. Sometimes the authentication is part of the path (a request for the user's profile would have the user id in the path), other times just as parameters (?user_id=1&auth=secret), and for POST requests, part of the incoming body as JSON.
Also, there are 3 methods of authentication in the app. You can log in with a Facebook UID, email address, or using the unique id of the device you're using. The result is something that looks like this:
##User [/user/{facebook_uid}{?access_token}, /user/{email}{?device_id}, /users/{device_auth_id}{?device_id}]
This works fine, and displays in the API as I'd expect:
But this introduces 2 issues:
1) If I wanted to add a set of parameters shared by all authentication methods, I would need to add it to all 3 like this:
## User [/user/{facebook_uid}{?access_token, extra_thing, this_too},
/user/{email}{?device_id, extra_thing, this_too},
/users/{device_auth_id}{?device_id, extra_thing, this_too}]
This seems a bit messy, it'd be much nicer to apply shared parameters at the end of the path array so they apply to all, something like this:
## User [/user/{facebook_uid}{?access_token}, /user/{email}{?device_id}, /users/{device_auth_id}{?device_id}]{&extra_thing, this_too}
But this doesn't work. Is there a way to do this? The documentation wasn't very helpful with more complicated stuff like this.
Also, would there be a way to create some kind of template which I could apply to all my methods? In the case where the authentication is part of the path its a bit unavoidable, but for other requests it would be nice to just do something like include: authentication and have it pull the unique_id/auth combo from a defined template somewhere.
Thanks!
First, there isn't really support for having a single model with multiple resource representations. It is an unusual thing to do and is actually good food for thought.
Second, using multiple URIs in [path segment] is probably going to confuse Apiary's mock server and make it unusable.
In my opinion, I'd split this into three models: Facebook User, E-mail User and Device User, with slightly different documentation (how are they created? Can you really create all of them through api? etc. etc.)
It also depends on how you want to document this. As path segments are not validated (it would be strange to have different resources based on the type of the arguments), you can just have (and I'd personally do just that)
## User [/user/{id}{?access_token, extra_thing, this_too}]
+ Parameters
+ id (required, string, `test#example.com`)...id of the user. Can be either user's e-mail, facebook id or device id from where user was created.
As for reusable parts, this is currently being implemented with authentication being part of that.
Scenario:
I have a Board model in my Rails server side, and an Android device is trying to post some content to a specific board via a POST. Finally, the server needs to send back a response to the Android device.
How do I parse the POST manually (or do I need to)? I am not sure how to handle this kind of external request. I looked into Metal, Middleware, HttpParty; but none of them seems to fit what I am trying to do. The reason I want to parse it manually is because some of the information I want will not be part of the parameters.
Does anyone know a way to approach this problem?
I am also thinking about using SSL later on, how might this affect the problem?
Thank you in advance!! :)
I was trying to make a cross-domain request from ie9 to my rails app, and I needed to parse the body of a POST manually because ie9's XDR object restricts the contentType that we can send to text/plain, rather than application/x-www-urlencoded (see this post). Originally I had just been using the params hash provided by the controller, but once I restricted the contentType and dataType in my ajax request, that hash no longer contained the right information.
Following the URL in the comment above (link), I learned the how to recover that information. The author mentions that in a rails controller we always have access to a request variable that gives us an instance of the ActionDispatch::Request object. I tried to use request.query_string to get at the request body, but that just returned an empty string. A bit of snooping in the API, though, uncovered the raw_post method. That method returned exactly what I needed!
To "parse it manually" you could iterate over the string returned by request.raw_post and do whatever you want, but I don't recommend it. I used Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query, as suggested in Arthur Gunn's answer to this question, to parse the raw_post into a hash. Once it is in hash form, you can shove whatever else you need in there, and then merge it with the params hash. Doing this meant I didn't have to change much else in my controller!
params.merge!(Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query(request.raw_post))
Hope that helps someone!
Not sure exactly what you mean by "manually", posts are normally handled by the "create" or "update" methods in the controller. Check out the controller for your Board model, and you can add code to the appropriate method. You can access the params with the params hash.
You should be more specific about what you are trying to do. :)
I am trying to make a RESTful api and have some function which needs credentials. For example say I'm writing a function which finds all nearby places within a certain radius, but only authorised users can use it.
One way to do it is to send it all using GET like so:
http://myapi.heroku.com/getNearbyPlaces?lon=12.343523&lat=56.123533&radius=30&username=john&password=blabla123
but obviously that's the worst possible way to do it.
Is it possible to instead move the username and password fields and embed them as POST variables over SSL, so the URL will only look like so:
https://myapi.heroku.com/getNearbyPlaces?lon=12.343523&lat=56.123533&radius=30
and the credentials will be sent encrypted.
How would I then in Sinatra and Ruby properly get at the GET and POST variables? Is this The Right Way To Do It? If not why not?
If you are really trying to create a restful API instead if some URL endpoints which happen to speak some HTTP dialect, you should stick to GET. It's even again in your path, so you seem to be pretty sure it's a get.
Instead of trying to hide the username and password in GET or POST parameters, you should instead use Basic authentication, which was invented especially for that purpose and is universally available in clients (and is available using convenience methods in Sinatra).
Also, if you are trying to use REST, you should embrace the concept of resources and resoiurce collections (which is implied by the R and E of REST). So you have a single URL like http://myapi.heroku.com/NearbyPlaces. If you GET there, you gather information about that resource, if you POST, you create a new resource, if you PUT yopu update n existing resource and if you DELETE, well, you delete it. What you should do before is th structure your object space into these resources and design your API around it.
Possibly, you could have a resource collection at http://myapi.heroku.com/places. Each place as a resource has a unique URL like http://myapi.heroku.com/places/123. New polaces can be created by POSTing to http://myapi.heroku.com/places. And nearby places could be gathered by GETing http://myapi.heroku.com/places/nearby?lon=12.343523&lat=56.123533&radius=30. hat call could return an Array or URLs to nearby places, e.g.
[
"http://myapi.heroku.com/places/123",
"http://myapi.heroku.com/places/17",
"http://myapi.heroku.com/places/42"
]
If you want to be truly discoverable, you might also embrace HATEOAS which constraints REST smentics in a way to allows API clients to "browse" through the API as a user with a browser would do. To allow this, you use Hyperlink inside your API which point to other resources, kind of like in the example above.
The params that are part of the url (namely lon, lat and radius) are known as query parameters, the user and password information that you want to send in your form are known as form parameters. In Sinatra both of these type of parameters are made available in the params hash of a controller.
So in Sinatra you would be able to access your lon parameter as params[:lon] and the user parameter as params[:user].
I suggest using basic or digest authentication and a plain GET request. In other words, your request should be "GET /places?lat=x&lon=x&radius=x" and you should let HTTP handle the authentication. If I understand your situation correctly, this is the ideal approach and will certainly be the most RESTful solution.
As an aside, your URI could be improved. Having verbs ("get") and query-like adjectives ("nearby") in your resource names is not really appropriate. In general, resources should be nouns (ie. "places", "person", "books"). See the example request I wrote above; "get" is redundant because you are using a GET request and "nearby" is redundant because you are already querying by location.