Suggestions for the HTTP API (and Questions)

[Marc <marc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sender: Marc <marc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hello All,

I am not familiar with how many people are on this list, but this is my 
first post to it so please be patient with me :>  I would like to start off 
with some general suggestions in light of the changes that I make to the 
API locally.

1) I would suggest at some point replacing peUserAgent, peContentType and 
peSOAPAction with a single parm: peHeaders.  This allows the programmer to 
decide what extra headers to include without having to modify the API.  One 
of the sites we access requires 3 or 4 specialized headers, and the 
addition of the SoapAction header parm illustrates to me the potential need 
for many more parms.  This change would not be very backwards compatible, 
but would be very forwards compatible :>

2) Have https_init() clear wkEnvH when it fails (except in the case where 
it has already been initialized).  For those who use named activation 
groups, not clearing it results in an inability to retry the operation 
after the problem which caused it to fail has been fixed.

3) Have the automatic registration function register the application ID as 
a client rather than a server (the default).  I have a code snippet which 
does this FWIW...

Now here are my questions:

1) How does everyone deal with the fact that authority is needed for the 
certificate store file in order to establish an SSL connection?  I looked 
up gsk_secure_soc_open and it says you need to have authority to it, but an 
IBMer that I spoke to said that they use GSKit for their client side secure 
FTP and the users do not need authority to those files.  In fact he 
insisted that no authority was needed (I tested it thoroughly later and 
determined that yes it was (as documented)).  Have you all found this to be 
the case?  If not would you be able to let me know some info on your config?

2) The 1.8 version removed the 'connection: close' from the requests.  This 
broke an existing app for me where the program hangs on the select in 
ssl_recvdoc if the connection close is not specified.  I can provide a 
sample URL and postdata if someone wants to try it.  I was able to work 
around it (by specifying connection: close in my peHeaders parm), but it 
makes me worry as to how to determine when it is needed and when it is 
not.  I did notice the content length returned when it was missing was 306 
versus 700 when that header was provided, so I don't know to what extent it 
is something strange happening on the remote end.

3) When connecting to one site with POST (and it returns chunked output) it 
returns an error code of 200 instead of 100, which causes the call to 
fail.  This is as a result of the post data being empty.  Is this something 
the remote server should handle or should the API not expect the 
100-continue if the postdata length was zero?

Thank you for your time and help.

Rgds,

Marc


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