Question

I have a problem right now with CodeIgniter : I use the REST Controller library (which is really awesome) to create an API but I can not get PUT requests…

This is my code :

function user_put() {
    $user_id = $this->get("id");
    echo $user_id;
    $username = $this->put("username");
    echo $username;
}

I use curl to make the request :

curl -i -X PUT -d "username=test" http://[...]/user/id/1

The user_id is full but the username variable is empty. Yet it works with the verbs POST and GET.
Have you any idea please?

Thank you !

Answer 1

According to: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/working-with-restful-services-in-codeigniter-2/ we should consult https://github.com/philsturgeon/codeigniter-restserver/blob/master/application/libraries/REST_Controller.php#L544 to see that this method:

/**
 * Detect method
 *
 * Detect which method (POST, PUT, GET, DELETE) is being used
 * 
 * @return string 
 */
protected function _detect_method() {
  $method = strtolower($this->input->server('REQUEST_METHOD'));

  if ($this->config->item('enable_emulate_request')) {
    if ($this->input->post('_method')) {
      $method = strtolower($this->input->post('_method'));
    } else if ($this->input->server('HTTP_X_HTTP_METHOD_OVERRIDE')) {
      $method = strtolower($this->input->server('HTTP_X_HTTP_METHOD_OVERRIDE'));
    }      
  }

  if (in_array($method, array('get', 'delete', 'post', 'put'))) {
    return $method;
  }

  return 'get';
}

looks to see if we’ve defined the HTTP header HTTP_X_HTTP_METHOD_OVERRIDE and it uses that in favor of the actual verb we’ve implemented on the web. To use this in a request you would specify the header X-HTTP-Method-Override: method (so X-HTTP-Method-Override: put) to generate a custom method override. Sometimes the framework expects X-HTTP-Method instead of X-HTTP-Method-Override so this varies by framework.

If you were doing such a request via jQuery, you would integrate this chunk into your ajax request:

beforeSend: function (XMLHttpRequest) {
   //Specify the HTTP method DELETE to perform a delete operation.
   XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("X-HTTP-Method-Override", "DELETE");
}