A Real XML API and Rails

I recently implemented an XML API that I intended to be used outside of a web browser. Much of the words others have written on the topic are ways to get a Javascript framework to use the authentication_token magic. Some others show the GET side and mention the DELETE but omit the PUT and POST methods.

Here are things I've learned:

• To ensure XML data is returned, use the correct HTTP header: Accept: application/xml
• Rails assumes that multipart forms and url-encoded forms are from browsers. You can't use them in a default Rails setup if you want to avoid the authentication_token check.
• To POST or PUT, use a header of Content-Type: application/xml and include XML data.

It is rather unfortunate that Rails assumes that the encoding ties into a browser. It should be possible to use any encoding so long as the XML data types in the headers are correct. This is probably a bug, but it might be that if you receive XML through an API, you should send XML too.

Example

curl --user user:password -H 'Accept: application/xml' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/xml' \
  -X POST -d '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<item>
  <name>foo</name>
  <description>bar</description>
  <price>100</price>
</item>' http://localhost:3000/items/create