Question

I’m having a very strange issue with AppEngine and the Context.IO API.

I’m using a the contextIO2 library, which uses python-oauth2.

When I try out the library (contextIO2) via the terminal, I get no problems (or at least, not yet. But I’ve tried it several dozen times across a couple of days without problem).

But when running code on AppEngine, I sometimes get a 401 Authorization Invalid consumer key error. I’m not sure what causes it, since one minute the request goes fine, then when I try the request again I get the 401, then after a while it will be fine, then not fine again, so on.

I emailed Context.IO support, and he said that when he tries the url of my app and got the error, “oauth_consumer_key doesn’t seem to be correctly transmitted”. What could be causing this? AppEngine messing up the request? pythoan-oauth2 bug? contextIO2 bug?

Here’s one of my handlers’ code:

class ReceiveConnectTokenHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        contextio_token = self.request.get('contextio_token')
        cio = ContextIO(API_KEY, API_SECRET)
        # get token's associated email
        try:
            token = cio.get_connect_token(contextio_token)
        except RequestError, e:
            if e.status_code == 404:
                self.response.write(
                    'Token %s not found. ' % contextio_token)
                return
            raise e
        account = token.account
        if not account or not account.email_addresses:
            self.response.write(
                'Token %s has no email associated with it yet.' % contextio_token)
            return
        email = account.email_addresses[0]
        # clear email's memcache
        memcache.delete_multi(['accounts', 'no_account'], namespace=email)
        self.response.write(
            '''%s is now connected with Context.IO. Please verify in the
            gadget that you have granted access. You can close this window.''' % email
        )

It’s just a simple GET on https://api.context.io/2.0/connect_tokens/{{token}}

Answer 1

Posting answer as per Greg’s suggestion.

The issue was that the contextIO2 library defined it’s request_uri method by:

def request_uri(uri, method='GET', params={}, headers={}):

which is a common Python pitfall (#5 in this list). I’ve notified Context.IO support and have sent a pull request.