Thursday, June 2, 2016

Sitecore WebApi missing context

Sitecore & WebApi


A lot has already been written about Sitecore and WebApi the last years since your custom WebApi calls didn't work anymore without a little tweaking. We have used the solution by Patrick Delancy a few times now and it worked fine. Until today..
Well, the issue seemed to be in the WebApi but it turned out to be something else. My journey of the day:

WebApi call is missing all Sitecore context

Our starting point was indeed a web api request that had no Sitecore context. The request looked like this: 
"http://website/api/stores/nearby/50.860421/4.422365"

First thing to do was compare configs and code with other projects where it was working, but that didn't help. All was fine there.. 
When I tried to place a language in between the domain and the path (../en/api/...) I got a 404 error from IIS. Weird. Nothing from Sitecore, although this should work. So I had my first conclusion: Sitecore is rejecting the request. 

Inspect the httpRequestBegin pipeline

I started inspecting the httpRequestBegin pipeline and noticed that it was skipped in the first step, the CheckIgnoreFlag. A custom processor placed before this step got hit, the one right behind it didn't. So I had to continue my search in.. 

The preprocessRequest pipeline

The preprocessRequest performs several checks in order to determine whether the request is valid for Sitecore. After staring at it for a while my eye fell on the dot. A simple stupid ".". The web api action was expecting 2 doubles as parameters and as this all should work find, there is a filter in this Sitecore pipeline on extensions: the FilterUrlExtensions. And of course, Sitecore is thinking that our extension is 422365 :)

The fix

Fixing this seemed very simple: just a a trailing slash to the request. And there we had our context again!

So remember when using doubles in web api request: use a trailing slash if it is your last parameter...

No comments:

Post a Comment