Http request source

Attributes

URI:	http://www.xmlpipe.org/xpe/source/http
Type:	source
Namespace:	http://www.xml.org/pipe/HTTP
Owner:	http://www.xmlpipe.org/xpe

Description

This source models a HTTP request. It can accept both HTTP GET and HTTP POST requests. An example of the XML document generated by a GET HTTP request is shown below:

   <h:httpRequest requestURL="http://localhost:8080/xpe/echoTest" h:timestamp="1120910926202" encoding="UTF-8" pipeContext="/echoTest" path="/echoTest" pathParent="/" node="echoTest" contextPath="/xpe" uri="/xpe/echoTest" sessionId="B5D23AD80DB39255291F4B85ED941217" method="GET" xmlns:h="http://www.xml.org/pipe/HTTP" >
      <h:requestor host="127.0.0.1" />
      <h:heads>
         <h:head name="host" value="localhost:8080" />
         <h:head name="user-agent" value="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0" />
         <h:head name="accept" value="text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5" >
         </h:head>
         <h:head name="accept-language" value="en-us,en;q=0.5" />
         <h:head name="accept-encoding" value="gzip,deflate" />
         <h:head name="accept-charset" value="ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7" />
         <h:head name="keep-alive" value="300" />
         <h:head name="connection" value="keep-alive" />
         <h:head name="cookie" value="JSESSIONID=B5D23AD80DB39255291F4B85ED941217" >
         </h:head>
      </h:heads>
      <h:cookies>
         <h:cookie name="JSESSIONID" value="B5D23AD80DB39255291F4B85ED941217" />
      </h:cookies>
      <h:params>
         <h:param name="username" value="fred" />
      </h:params>
      <h:params>
         <h:param name="password" value="flintstone" />
      </h:params>
   </h:httpRequest>

The following example illustrates the XML generated by this source in response to a POST request:

   <h:httpRequest requestURL="http://localhost:8188/xpe/test/echo" h:timestamp="1148939208140" pipeContext="/test/echo" path="/test/echo" pathParent="/test/" node="echo" contextPath="/xpe" uri="/xpe/test/echo" sessionId="cdb88a029b95ac6c" method="POST" xmlns:h="http://www.xml.org/pipe/HTTP" >
      <h:requestor host="127.0.0.1" />
      <h:heads>
         <h:head name="connection" value="close" />
         <h:head name="content-length" value="143" />
         <h:head name="content-type" value="text/xml" />
         <h:head name="user-agent" value="Java/1.5.0_04" />
         <h:head name="host" value="localhost:8188" />
         <h:head name="accept" value="text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2" />
      </h:heads>
      <h:cookies/>
      <h:params/>
      <h:body mimeType="text/xml" >
         <authentication xmlns="" >
            <username>
               fred4
            </username>
            <password>
               flintstone
            </password>
         </authentication>
      </h:body>
   </h:httpRequest>

These two examples illustrate a number of important points:

The XML produced by a HTTP GET and a HTTP POST request contain the same HTTP header information.
The XML produced in response to a HTTP POST request contains the posted data in the body of the request (http:body element)
The XML produced in response to a HTTP GET request has the parameters expressed as name/value pairs within the http:params element.

Parameters

Parameter name	Description	Example
createSession	Whether to create session.	<xnode type="http://www.xmlpipe.org/xpe/source/http" xmlns="" > <property name="createSession" value="true" /> </xnode>

By default XPE establishes a session for each request if one is not already established. Setting the createSession parameter to false within a pipeline will overide this behaviour thereby stopping XPE from creating a session.

Example usage

The following example illustrates how the HTTP Request Source is used within an XPE pipeline definition (xpipedef.xml) file: