AJAX, JQuery, Parse - which one will get me my array? - ajax

In my codeacademy and codeschool lessons, I've been fetching data from google rss and simulated twitter feeds.
My newest exercise, however, involves fetching an array of text data from a REST API.
When I try
$.get('https://api.parse.com/1/classes/chats?order=-createdAt', function(x){$('.messages').append('<li>'+x.responseText+'</li>');});
I get
which has the text and username I need. Sort of...
but when I try to alert or console.log either *x.responseText or x.responseText.results I obviously get undefined instead of an array.
What am I missing?
Study more AJAX and I'll find a technique?
Or do I have to send special instructions to the parse server using some commands found here.

You are not using XMLHttpRequest directly, you are using jQuery and it will read the responseText and handle it for you.
Just use x (or, rather, x.results).

Related

Google Api Ruby Client to return the actual HTTP response, not the helper object

Is there an easy way to ask the google api ruby client to just give you back the stock HTTP response, rather than to perform the lovely, but slightly limiting translation into one of their ruby representable objects?
e.g.
response = Gmail.client.get_user_message("me", id)
=> #<Google::Apis::GmailV1::Message
response = Gmail.client.list_user_messages("me")
=> #<Google::Apis::GmailV1::ListMessagesResponse
but
response = Gmail.client.delete_user_message("me", id)
=>nil #successfully deleted
Now that's all fine and dandy, except that sometimes I just want to know what sort of response is going to come back. i.e. an HTTP response with maybe some JSON in the body. And then I'll worry about what I do with it...
I can take the response and use the
response.to_json
to get the body of the json that would have come back (though I still won't have the response code, and I need to KNOW that it's one of those objects first).
The client library is definitely getting that, it's just converting it into these objects before it lets me see it. And if I don't know that it's a google object (and not nil) I can't run that to_json consistently....
Any ideas other than second guess what google is going to send me back?
(I should note that this has come about when trying to move a library from dealing with their 0.8 api to their 0.9 api, so call me a cynic if you must but my faith that google won't make breaking changes to those objects returned is at a low ebb...
As far as I know, it is possible to ask the server to send only the fields you really need and get a partial response instead of the default full response as mentioned in Performance Tips.
However, I suggest that you please check the documentation for the specific API you are using to see if the field you're looking for is currently supported. For the Gmail API, you may go through Working with partial resources.
Here are the two types of partial requests that you can use:
Partial response: A request where you specify which fields to include in the response (use the fields request parameter).
Patch: An update request where you send only the fields you want to change (use the PATCH HTTP verb).
Hope that helps!

reCaptcha invalid json response

Using the recaptcha javascript client ( http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?onload=vcRecaptchaApiLoaded&render=explicit ) the automatic request (GET https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/userverify?k=XXXXXXXXX) after you select the correct images returns an invalid json which afterwards is sent to back to google and their json validation fails. This worked as expected for months now. Not anymore :(
Server side library used reCaptcha PHP (1.1)
Response
)]}'
["uvresp","03AHJ_Vuup5SJJ583dSIfezFl80dp2AlJ_rZpz3vqGWlOTmbjZqH8izwjruJASNhQI0tOOnmj2Pzg14xMw7dryeqVfTGhx6dg_x2i0PRA1ZeDyrBNn8DX-w5S262Zb3_ZWKj5JDBiqPVnXtNLGbyBxjd97VHanspJWU_-qKWLSWVKxLK6n3lm9Biw33oUCEiGA39GNa09Z6TSAEtnolQCf_LPPRWKoE_e50f2s5ZpUVG5GNVdX7qGBRwphTgcUhwOjA8uYTzmA9co3Jwk2KR5UQ0zzVRJzRZZTBuK9km3PE1WV05ACAwrJi29niDpVaRmpooAnIkHNgGyGBu7u3W7gU6YAHtwya8PYhdF__G_MMG8XpVFDTBa196hKD6hxw-E2PsxmoIQJrU1K89mmzNIh-xLNQ7KJvrBMzVf8A5FHyUQgL5UNDWVwSkWCdC_3swxBzi7R3p8VIrUtkIqJFA_GSAxy0cBRJ8J55Pfs5rzhfR8j-x1hGCzi_6vJrbrwfNesoLEB7GWJtElcljhBYvcDNzU_B_VJ7Sck-6i1Nd0qdmtSiCRZYNyaZ8uGLoDdNgCY-0Oi4802AlI26H7TjGBcKnr4gmaHXTNRf1W7x_3FV05DxVsTqeAlo8zGqmiVqcgmX64BbLK4fD9Xoait1_Lp5vK26fCaOQmGKF7CJaYPuxnX-zXgSkfZDCG6rs6xv1CfZQnIKD0W3Yz522VD4YdNfATb3FywhFWbZuxoBIt6vslZDlPXh2MYOkAmYfIPIo8WoWazMoLI_8iNBZPiMlRL0PS5aQiLSrvbf-sknMHhfM2MJYsfrQjC52aDRaHYdcZbY6Wxlhw0tQEknX8B47_DAQzCKkpoFsecO1eMHuInIykZ1l7TOdZMytI-NzGg21KeKAE8dK6ZWee0UEqDJvCkj5aH5TQcBA--ygbOS186bAptUP5n6WvORx1Nb2ZU_AF9fB23PJWH1xvB4gZoNDvhLmdpkE1Po9Lyim1P61E2rrgYjWgPRwT4jUo",1,120]
Any ideas?
Thanks
I think it's a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/a/36862268/2140017
And here is my answer from that link:
Actually the value returned is not valid json but well parsed by the
Google's API.
Is it a protection ? I don't know, but if you look at the javascript,
you can find that:
var jm=function(a,b,c,d,e,g,h,l,r){this.xl=a;this.$c=c||"GET";this.Ka=d;this.Gg=e||null;this.Td=m(h)?h:1;this.ye=0;this.xh=this.Nh=!1;this.uh=b;this.Mh=g;this.md=l||"";this.Zb=!!r;this.Wf=null};f=jm.prototype;f.getUrl=function(){return this.xl};f.ug=function(){return this.$c};f.Ca=function(){return this.Ka};f.fi=function(){return this.Zb};f.bi=function(){return this.md};var nm=function(){G.call(this);this.nj=new hm(0,mm,1,10,5E3);H(this,this.nj);this.ad=0};x(nm,G);var mm=new Nh;nm.prototype.send=function(a){return new Lc(function(b,c){var d=String(this.ad++);this.nj.send(d,a.Uf.toString(),a.ug(),a.Ca(),mm,void 0,u(function(a,d){var h=d.target;if(Xk(h)){var l=a.ml;h.B?(h=h.B.responseText,0==h.indexOf(")]}'\n")&&(h=h.substring(5)),h=Hg(h)):h=void 0;b(new l(h))}else c(new om(a))},this,a))},this)};var om=function(a){y.call(this);this.request=a};x(om,y);
especially take a look at:
var l=a.ml;h.B?(h=h.B.responseText,0==h.indexOf(")]}'\n")&&(h=h.substring(5)),h=Hg(h)):h=void 0;`
The parser explicitly checks that the value begins by )]} and strips
it.
I suggest you to just apply the same substring on the "json" string

Use of Mechanize

I want to get response from websites that take a simple input, which is also reflected in the parameter of the url. Is it better to simply get the result by using conventional methods, for example OpenURI.open_uri(...) with some parameter set, or it is better to use mechanize, extract the form, and get the result through submit?
The mechanize page gives an example of extracting a form and submitting it to get the search result from Google search. However, this much can be done simply as OpenURI.open_uri("http://www.google.com/search?q=...").read. Is there any reason I should try to use one way or the other?
There are lots of sites where it turns out to be easiest to use mechanize. If you need to log in, and set a cookie before accessing the data, then mechanize is a simple way of doing this. Similarly, if there are lots of hidden fields that need to be matched (such as CSRF token), then fetching the page using mechanize then submitting it with the data filled out is often a more foolproof method that crafting the URL yourself.
If it is a simple URI, like google's search pages, then manually constructing it may be simpler.

How do I parse a POST to my Rails 3.1 server manually?

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. :)

What does a Ajax call response like 'for (;;); { json data }' mean? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Why do people put code like “throw 1; <dont be evil>” and “for(;;);” in front of json responses?
I found this kind of syntax being used on Facebook for Ajax calls. I'm confused on the for (;;); part in the beginning of response. What is it used for?
This is the call and response:
GET http://0.131.channel.facebook.com/x/1476579705/51033089/false/p_1524926084=0
Response:
for (;;);{"t":"continue"}
I suspect the primary reason it's there is control. It forces you to retrieve the data via Ajax, not via JSON-P or similar (which uses script tags, and so would fail because that for loop is infinite), and thus ensures that the Same Origin Policy kicks in. This lets them control what documents can issue calls to the API — specifically, only documents that have the same origin as that API call, or ones that Facebook specifically grants access to via CORS (on browsers that support CORS). So you have to request the data via a mechanism where the browser will enforce the SOP, and you have to know about that preface and remove it before deserializing the data.
So yeah, it's about controlling (useful) access to that data.
Facebook has a ton of developers working internally on a lot of projects, and it is very common for someone to make a minor mistake; whether it be something as simple and serious as failing to escape data inserted into an HTML or SQL template or something as intricate and subtle as using eval (sometimes inefficient and arguably insecure) or JSON.parse (a compliant but not universally implemented extension) instead of a "known good" JSON decoder, it is important to figure out ways to easily enforce best practices on this developer population.
To face this challenge, Facebook has recently been going "all out" with internal projects designed to gracefully enforce these best practices, and to be honest the only explanation that truly makes sense for this specific case is just that: someone internally decided that all JSON parsing should go through a single implementation in their core library, and the best way to enforce that is for every single API response to get for(;;); automatically tacked on the front.
In so doing, a developer can't be "lazy": they will notice immediately if they use eval(), wonder what is up, and then realize their mistake and use the approved JSON API.
The other answers being provided seem to all fall into one of two categories:
misunderstanding JSONP, or
misunderstanding "JSON hijacking".
Those in the first category rely on the idea that an attacker can somehow make a request "using JSONP" to an API that doesn't support it. JSONP is a protocol that must be supported on both the server and the client: it requires the server to return something akin to myFunction({"t":"continue"}) such that the result is passed to a local function. You can't just "use JSONP" by accident.
Those in the second category are citing a very real vulnerability that has been described allowing a cross-site request forgery via tags to APIs that do not use JSONP (such as this one), allowing a form of "JSON hijacking". This is done by changing the Array/Object constructor, which allows one to access the information being returned from the server without a wrapping function.
However, that is simply not possible in this case: the reason it works at all is that a bare array (one possible result of many JSON APIs, such as the famous Gmail example) is a valid expression statement, which is not true of a bare object.
In fact, the syntax for objects defined by JSON (which includes quotation marks around the field names, as seen in this example) conflicts with the syntax for blocks, and therefore cannot be used at the top-level of a script.
js> {"t":"continue"}
typein:2: SyntaxError: invalid label:
typein:2: {"t":"continue"}
typein:2: ....^
For this example to be exploitable by way of Object() constructor remapping, it would require the API to have instead returned the object inside of a set of parentheses, making it valid JavaScript (but then not valid JSON).
js> ({"t":"continue"})
[object Object]
Now, it could be that this for(;;); prefix trick is only "accidentally" showing up in this example, and is in fact being returned by other internal Facebook APIs that are returning arrays; but in this case that should really be noted, as that would then be the "real" cause for why for(;;); is appearing in this specific snippet.
Well the for(;;); is an infinite loop (you can use Chrome's JavaScript console to run that code in a tab if you want, and then watch the CPU-usage in the task manager go through the roof until the browser kills the tab).
So I suspect that maybe it is being put there to frustrate anyone attempting to parse the response using eval or any other technique that executes the returned data.
To explain further, it used to be fairly commonplace to parse a bit of JSON-formatted data using JavaScript's eval() function, by doing something like:
var parsedJson = eval('(' + jsonString + ')');
...this is considered unsafe, however, as if for some reason your JSON-formatted data contains executable JavaScript code instead of (or in addition to) JSON-formatted data then that code will be executed by the eval(). This means that if you are talking with an untrusted server, or if someone compromises a trusted server, then they can run arbitrary code on your page.
Because of this, using things like eval() to parse JSON-formatted data is generally frowned upon, and the for(;;); statement in the Facebook JSON will prevent people from parsing the data that way. Anyone that tries will get an infinite loop. So essentially, it's like Facebook is trying to enforce that people work with its API in a way that doesn't leave them vulnerable to future exploits that try to hijack the Facebook API to use as a vector.
I'm a bit late and T.J. has basically solved the mystery, but I thought I'd share a great paper on this particular topic that has good examples and provides deeper insight into this mechanism.
These infinite loops are a countermeasure against "Javascript hijacking", a type of attack that gained public attention with an attack on Gmail that was published by Jeremiah Grossman.
The idea is as simple as beautiful: A lot of users tend to be logged in permanently in Gmail or Facebook. So what you do is you set up a site and in your malicious site's Javascript you override the object or array constructor:
function Object() {
//Make an Ajax request to your malicious site exposing the object data
}
then you include a <script> tag in that site such as
<script src="http://www.example.com/object.json"></script>
And finally you can read all about the JSON objects in your malicious server's logs.
As promised, the link to the paper.
This looks like a hack to prevent a CSRF attack. There are browser-specific ways to hook into object creation, so a malicious website could use do that first, and then have the following:
<script src="http://0.131.channel.facebook.com/x/1476579705/51033089/false/p_1524926084=0" />
If there weren't an infinite loop before the JSON, an object would be created, since JSON can be eval()ed as javascript, and the hooks would detect it and sniff the object members.
Now if you visit that site from a browser, while logged into Facebook, it can get at your data as if it were you, and then send it back to its own server via e.g., an AJAX or javascript post.

Resources