Issue with matching Accept field in request header about appengine-rest-server HOT 5 CLOSED

With your accept header, you are indicating that "application/json" and "*/*" 
are equally acceptable.  you can solve the problem by either removing the "*/*" 
or by indicating that "application/json" has a higher preference, e.g.: 
"application/json, */*; q=0.5".

Hi Jahlborn - thanks for getting back so quickly.

It does seem a very strange best match algorithm which 
takes a list of options of the form 'StringA, wildcard' and
does a match against the set (StringA, StringB) and gives
precedence to the wildcard matching StringB over the
exact match StringA.

Is this something that's deep in the bowels of AppEngine?
If so, I might ask some Google folk abt it.

TIA,
Seán.

This isn't an algorithm defined by google, this is an algorithm defined by the 
http spec.  it is implemented as it should be.  see: 
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html .  python implementation 
reference here: http://pythonpaste.org/webob/reference.html#accept-headers .

Hi Jahlborn - thanks again for speedy reply.

If my understanding of the http spec is correct, there seems to be quite
a lot of wiggle room - it's not very specific regarding how this should
be implemented. Further, I'd suggest that the way best_match currently
works is not in the spirit of the spec which makes reference to intelligent
precedence rules.

I'd argue that the precedence rules of best_match are quite unintuitive
and I think the example above is a good example of this.

Further, it is worth noting that there can be problems setting the
accept header in browsers, in particular with jquery

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1145588/cannot-properly-set-the-accept-http-h
eader-with-jquery

but also more generally

http://www.grauw.nl/blog/entry/470

Not really sure what the best solution should be but just pointing out that it 
is
sometimes difficult to have full control over what the browser sends in
the accept field.

In my app, I'm just dealing with JSON, so I'm just gonna modify the library 
locally to dish out JSON by default rather than XML - probably suboptimal,
but works for me.

BR,
Seán.

okay.  guess you can take that up with the appengine folks.