Question

I am trying to dispatch a POST request to get an upload token from YouTube using RequestBuilder from the client-side of my GWT app.

I am trying to build the request as described by the following YouTube API documentation:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_browser_based_uploading#Browser_based_uploading

The following is my client-side GWT code:

// BODY
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.append("<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>"
        + "<entry xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom\""
        + "xmlns:media=\"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/\""
        + "xmlns:yt=\"http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007\">"
        + "<media:group>"
        + "<media:title type=\"plain\">MyTitle</media:title>"
        + "<media:description type=\"plain\">"
        + "My description."
        + "</media:description>"
        + "<media:category scheme=\"http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/categories.cat\">"
        + "People"
        + "</media:category>"
        + "<media:keywords>word1, word2</media:keywords>"
        + "</media:group>"
        + "</entry>");

String requestBody = sb.toString();

// HEADER
RequestBuilder rb = new RequestBuilder(RequestBuilder.POST, "https://" + YOUTUBE_HOST + "/action/GetUploadToken");
rb.setHeader("Host", YOUTUBE_HOST);
rb.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/atom+xml; charset=" + CHAR_ENCODING);
rb.setHeader("X-GData-Key", MY_CLIENT_KEY);
rb.setHeader("GData-Version", "2");
try {
    rb.setHeader("Content-Length", Integer.toString(requestBody.getBytes(CHAR_ENCODING).length));
}
catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    Window.alert(e.getMessage());
}
rb.setHeader("Authorization", "Bearer " + AUTHORIZATION_CODE);

// CALL
try {
    rb.sendRequest(requestBody, new RequestCallback() {
        @Override
        public void onResponseReceived(Request request, Response response) {
            Document dom = XMLParser.parse(response.getText());

            Node urlNode = dom.getElementsByTagName("url").item(0);
            String url = urlNode.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();

            Node tokenNode = dom.getElementsByTagName("token").item(0);
            String token = tokenNode.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
        }

        @Override
        public void onError(Request request, Throwable t) {
            callback.onFailure(t.getMessage());
        }
    });
}
catch (RequestException e) {
    callback.onFailure(e.getMessage());
}

The following is my request as displayed in Chrome’s developer tools:

Request URL:https://gdata.youtube.com/action/GetUploadToken
Request Method:OPTIONS
Status Code:404 Not Found

Request Headers

:host:gdata.youtube.com
:method:OPTIONS
:path:/action/GetUploadToken
:scheme:https
:version:HTTP/1.1
accept:*/*
accept-charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
accept-encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
accept-language:en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6
access-control-request-headers:origin, x-gdata-key, authorization, content-type, gdata-version
access-control-request-method:POST
origin:http://127.0.0.1:8888
referer:http://127.0.0.1:8888/MyApp.html?gwt.codesvr=127.0.0.1:9997
user-agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.95 Safari/537.11

Response Headers

cache-control:no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
content-encoding:gzip
content-length:117
content-type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
date:Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:29:20 GMT
expires:Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
pragma:no-cache
server:GSE
status:404 Not Found
version:HTTP/1.1
x-content-type-options:nosniff
x-frame-options:SAMEORIGIN
x-gdata-user-country:US
x-xss-protection:1; mode=block

As seen above, I am getting a “404 Not Found” error after dispatching the request.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I am not super familiar with GWT, but I noticed something peculiar. The request that Chrome is reporting is, in fact, an OPTIONS request, not a POST as the YouTube API requires. I am able to reproduce the 404 when sending an arbitrary OPTIONS request to this URL.

Your code indicates that you are attempting to send a POST request. However, I assume this is a cross-origin request, which would be governed by the Same Origin Policy. Take a look at this example of cross-site requests using GWT. It is possible that the odd behavior of sending an OPTIONS request instead of a POST request is due to the code treating this as if it were a same-site request.