Question

Quote from Opera documentation (first link i’ve found):

Standard or custom headers are appropriate values for
Access-Control-Allow-Headers. For the cross-origin request to succeed,
its value must match (or include) the value of the
Access-Control-Request-Headers header.

I’m sending a request using jQuery. If i comment out setRequestHeader:

$(function() {            
    $.ajax({
        url: 'http://silex.local/users',
        method: 'GET',
        beforeSend : function(req) {
            //req.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'FID ds7sd6:32n8942b3672n2');
        }
    });
});

It shouldn’t work, since the server is responding with:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 02:15:14 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) PHP/5.3.14
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.14
Cache-Control: no-cache
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

While client is requesting with:

GET http://silex.local/users HTTP/1.1
Host: silex.local
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: it-it,it;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://localhost/test.html
Origin: http://localhost
Cache-Control: max-age=0

What i’m missing? Sorry if this is an odd question, first time with CORS for me…

Answer 1

I think you misunderstand what Access-Control-Allow-Headers does (that poorly-worded quote doesn’t help). It allows the server to tell the browser which headers are acceptable for cross-Origin XHR requests to set.

It does not mean that those headers are mandatory. If a script doesn’t set a header, the request is still allowed to happen.