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Specifying request headers in ContentLoader functions

rwiseman
1-Newbie

Specifying request headers in ContentLoader functions

I've created a service that tries to load and return JSON from a URL that needs the "Accept: application/json" header in order to return JSON.

var params = {
    url: url,
    headers: {Accept:"application/json"}
};
var result = Resources["ContentLoaderFunctions"].LoadJSON(params);

That's basically all it is.  I've tested the URL using Postman and it does indeed return JSON, e.g.:

[{"time":"Wed, 09 Nov 2016 01:22:14 GMT","value":"87"}]

Without the "Accept" header, it returns XML.

However, I cannot get my service to return the JSON object!  Have I specified the header incorrectly?  The LoadJSON snippet says the type of the "headers" parameter is "JSON"; this suggests that what I've done is wrong, since I've used a JavaScript object.  The JSON would be:

"{\"Accept\":\"application/json\"}"

(i.e. a JSON-encoded string) but I've tried this too and got the same result, which is an empty response.  At least that's how it looks via the [Test] button.

What am I doing wrong?!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Thanks Carles, that helped me find the problem.  It turns out that if the return base type is JSON, testing the service shows nothing!  It should surely say that valid JSON has been returned but it doesn't!  The only indicator is that "Results:" has a light green background.  So when I returned a string instead of JSON I could see that JSON was actually being returned, and that the format is not what I expected:

{"headers":{"Accept":"application/json"},"array":[{"time":"Wed, 09 Nov 2016 01:22:14 GMT","value":"87"}]}

I "foolishly" expected the JSON returned to be ... well ... the JSON returned from the URL!

View solution in original post

6 REPLIES 6

Wait what is the actual error that you are seeing? What version of ThingWorx is this?

Did you tried with LoadText first to see if you get an answer?

Thanks Carles, that helped me find the problem.  It turns out that if the return base type is JSON, testing the service shows nothing!  It should surely say that valid JSON has been returned but it doesn't!  The only indicator is that "Results:" has a light green background.  So when I returned a string instead of JSON I could see that JSON was actually being returned, and that the format is not what I expected:

{"headers":{"Accept":"application/json"},"array":[{"time":"Wed, 09 Nov 2016 01:22:14 GMT","value":"87"}]}

I "foolishly" expected the JSON returned to be ... well ... the JSON returned from the URL!

Test ThingWorx services which returns JSON aren't shown on the Composer.

Hmm, sounds like something that should be changed!  I'm sure it wouldn't be that much effort to display JSON as a string, even...

I once made a Thing that wrapped the content loader services GetJSON/PostJSON, and stringified the JSON result so that it played nicer with composer. I still needed to copy and paste over to a JSON formatter to get it pretty but its at least a step easier than turning on my network monitor (F12), and inspecting the traffic. But only just barely.

It would be great if JSON results could be displayed in a nicely formatted result within composer.

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