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Subject: RE: [wsrp] WSRP url parameters and URL Encoding questions


Title: Message
A somewhat different approach would be to disallow "special" characters in the portlet-provided values, e.g., navigational state, etc.
 
This would mean that a portlet can only use, say, URL-allowed characters (alphanumeric+), but not /, #, :, ?, =, ;, %, etc. (the full list is documented in the corresponding RFC).
 
This will make it easy for the Consumer to process (no special handling, no dependency on Web server), and will also make it easy for portlets and Producers (easy rules, the portlet can always do one level of escaping and replace the % with, say a dash (-).
 
Escaping seems to be one of the more common sources for incompatibility and it may just be safer to sidestep rather than spend a lot of time to ensure that compatibility across Producers Consumers and Web servers.
 
My two cents,
Eilon
-----Original Message-----
From: Andre Kramer [mailto:andre.kramer@eu.citrix.com]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 7:41 PM
To: wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [wsrp] WSRP url parameters and URL Encoding questions

Rich,
 
Unfortunately, the collapsing of // to / also happens within parameters not just to the separators, e.g. the navigationalState parameter value written into the template by the producer is "a//b" but is modified to "a/b" following normal url path processing rules.
 
The whole path is subjected to this collapsing. The consumer can protect itself from this for its own parameter separators as you suggest (and even have special smarts for wsrp-url values), but the producer should not need to special case any "//" in its URL parameter values (wsrp-navigationalState and wsrp-interactionState are the only difficult parameters). That is why I'm suggesting doing a double encoding. We could instead suggest no consecutive '/'s allowed in navigationalState and interactionState but that seems very arbitrary.
 
regards,
Andre
-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Thompson [mailto:richt2@us.ibm.com]
Sent: 28 March 2003 16:42
To: wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [wsrp] WSRP url parameters and URL Encoding questions


It would be a good editorial clarification to comment that all parameter values should be URL encoded since they will appear in the URL activated by an End-User interaction. Does anyone object to adding such a comment?

As to the particular question about collapsing // into /, the Consumer can easily prevent this by using a construct such as /_ to separate parameters (or "/ns_" before the navigational state if so desired). I think we can leave it the Consumer's responsibility to properly construct its templates.

Rich Thompson



Andre Kramer <andre.kramer@eu.citrix.com>

03/28/2003 10:48 AM

       
        To:        wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org
        cc:        
        Subject:        [wsrp] WSRP url parameters and URL Encoding questions



In 10.2.1.1.4.1 we advice "wsrp-url" values to be URL Encoded.

However, we are silent on the remaining consumer rewriting tokens and their
producer URL writing counterparts. But the obvious thing to do is to URL
encode them all (i.e. if {wsrp-navigationalState} contains an "&" or a "/"
etc then URL Encode it. Or encode it anyway just to be safe).

Having URL Encoded all parameters, for producer template URL activation ,
the web server may even help out and do the URL decode for you.

Furthermore, in order to support method GET, URL templates must avoid query
strings. One strategy is to use a path ("/") instead, but I have found that
(after the above helpful URL decode) some Web Servers will replace any "//"
with a "/"!

[A valid transformation for file paths as, e.g. file path a///b == file path
a/b, but not great if one is encoding data as a path. We should not force
consumers to use "#" or ";" instead of "?", as these also have issues.]


Obviously this corrupts any (URL template) parameters that contain
consecutive back slashes, and we can not expect producers to know what URL
structure the consumer is using for it's templates. Both the decode and
collapsing consecutive "/"s seem valid things for the Web server to do but
they are interacting with our method=GET work around. What could we do?


The simplest solution seems to be to *double* URL Encode values when
replacing a  {wsp-someparameter} in templates. By double encode I mean
{wasp-paramValue} =
HttpUtility.UrlEncode(HttpUtility.UrlEncode(RawParamValue)) or
{wsrp-paramValue} = URLEncoder.encode(URLEncoder.encode(rawParamValue));

[A single URL encode should be enough for consumer rewriting. The consumer
can apply a second encode on re-writing (if required).]

This double encode does seem onerous at first, but has the advantage of
being always safe and independent of template schemes and usesMethodGet (as
well as constant for a Web Server environment & avoids us inventing a new
encoding scheme).

What do people think?

regards,
Andre




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