Breeze JS Security and Headers - security

We have used Breeze in our solution and it is working well. However, we are now at a place where we need to pass some identifying information as part of the header when we make the WebAPI call. How is this accomplished with Breeze queries?

I assume this link should help you;
http://www.breezejs.com/documentation/controlling-ajax
In general, you need to configure the internal ajax adapter (probably jQuery) before making a request.

Related

HTTP Calls integration pattern- Making HTTP calls directly from Javascript vs Axios vs Node, which is more secure?

A novice javascript developer here!
A have a basic question on whats the best and secured way to make HTTP calls from a front application to a backend service that needs an authentication. My application is a SPA (using Vue.js) & getting data from Java services. Java services need authentication details and return sensitive user data.
I see there are a few options and I wanted to understand a better approach amongst all 3-
Making direct HTTP calls from javascript code- Concern for using this approach is, as Javascript code can also be viewed via dev tools in browser, wont it be easier for anyone to do an inspect and view all critical authentication details hence making overall integration less secure?
Making an HTTP call using Axios via Vue framework- Seems like Axios is Promise based HTTP client for the browser that lets you easily make HTTP calls without much code overhead. but is this secure? is Javascript code loaded in the browser? Or the front end code sends the request and axios makes the request from backend server where the application is hosted?
Using Node- If front end application has unique routes configured for each API call and in my application if I have a route mapping to use request module and node js backend code to make those HTTP calls, is that going to be a robust and secure way of integration?
Please let me know your thoughts and apologies if this is a dumb question!
Not dumb at all. You're just learning.
My first question to your answer 😅 will be: is your application server-side rendered or it's sap + backend?
If it's server-side rendered then I would say it's secured since Node will be sending pages with all required data. On the dev tool, you will only see static files being loaded.
However, if it's SAP, I am not sure whether there is a way to hide whatsoever you send to the server from the dev tool. The only one thing you will need to do is to make sure you encrypt whatever is sensitive to your application.

why should I not use MVC Jsonresult instead of apicontroller get method

I have developed an application which was MVC application. It has a requirement that the application will return json data for one get request.
So I have added apicontroller and created a get method to return json data.
So far so good. but then I thought, is it really needed to add apicontroller to create just one get method.
I started exploring and googling what is the difference other than content negotiation. Got lots of answers and articles but non of them were satisfactory.
So here is the actual confusion, why can't I just create a method in the MVC controller with JsonResponse and return the json data(Which I know only is need for my requirement, but other application on different domain will consume it).
Can anyone convince me why should I use apicontroller instead of MVC JsonResponse for my requirement or should I not be using apicontroller at all.
apology if there is any mistake.
If I get it right the question is Can we use MVC action to serve json content answer is yes! Is it okay to use Json Result? answer is It depends where do you want to consume it
Say I am an in a Web Environment where I have no need for the APIs (that means I am not going to serve my data to multiple clients) If that's the scenario where only your View is going to consume data returned from your Action Method you are good to go. An Action returning a Json Result is basically an Action Result and that's what it is made for.
but If you are in a REST scenario and you need your backend to serve your data to the client de facto standard is to use an independent Web API for that.
Controllers' main responsibility should be to work as an intermediary between your View and Model and whatever service layer you want to bring inside it. on the other hand, Web APIs are data-driven there only purpose is to serve data (use them if you need them)
Web APIs are good cause they give you the flexibility of serving the data to possibly any client that might need it. That's what I would pick if I am starting from scratch but if I only need to serve data to one client Controller Action methods will be way to go.
Hope this helps.

How HTTP response is generated

I'm fairly new to programming and this question is about making sure I get the HTTP protocol correctly. My issue is that when I read about HTTP request/response, it looks like it needs to be in a very specific format with a status code, HTTP version number, headers, a blank line followed by the body.
However, after creating a web app with nodejs/express, I never once had to actually write code that made an HTTP response in this format (I'm assuming, although I don't know for sure that other frameworks like ruby on rails or python/Django are the same). In the express app, I just set up the route handlers to render the appropriate pages, when a request was made to that route.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the correct HTTP format behind the scenes? In other words, if I looked at the expressJS code, would there be something in that code that actually makes an HTTP response in the HTTP format?
My confusion is that, it seems like the HTTP request/response format is so important but somehow I never had to write any code dealing with it for a node/express application. Maybe this is the entire point of a framework like express... to take out the details so that developers can deal with business logic. And if that is correct, does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's response into the exact HTTP format?
I'm fairly new to programming and this question is about making sure I get the HTTP protocol correctly. My issue is that when I read about HTTP request/response, it looks like it needs to be in a very specific format with a status code, HTTP version number, headers, a blank line followed by the body.
Just to give you an idea, there are probably hundreds of specifications that have something to do with the HTTP protocol. They deal with not only the protocol itself, but also with the data format/encoding for everything you send including headers and all the various content types you can send, authentication schemes, caching, status codes, URL decoding, etc.... You can see some of the specifications involved just by looking here: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/.
Now a simple request and a simple text response could get away with only knowing a few of these specifications, but life is not always that simple.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the correct HTTP format behind the scenes? In other words, if I looked at the expressJS code, would there be something in that code that actually makes an HTTP response in the HTTP format?
Yes, there would. A combination of Express and the HTTP library that is built into node.js handle all the details of the specification for you. That's the advantage of using a library/framework. They even handle different versions of the protocol and feedback from thousands of other developers have helped them to clean up edge case bugs. A good library/framework allows you to still control any detail about the response (headers, content types, status codes, etc..) without making you have to go through the detail work of actually creating the exact response. This is a good thing. It lets you write code faster and lets you ride on the shoulders of others who have already figured out minutiae details that have nothing to do with the logic of your app.
In fact, one could say the same about the TCP protocol below the HTTP protocol. No regular app developer wants to write their own TCP stack. Instead, you just want a working TCP stack that you can use that's already been tuned and debugged for you.
However, after creating a web app with nodejs/express, I never once had to actually write code that made an HTTP response in this format (I'm assuming, although I don't know for sure that other frameworks like ruby on rails or python/Django are the same). In the express app, I just set up the route handlers to render the appropriate pages, when a request was made to that route.
Yes, this is a good thing. The framework did the detail work for you. You just call res.setHeader(), res.status(), res.cookie(), res.send(), res.json(), etc... and Express makes the entire response for you.
And if that is correct, does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's response into the exact HTTP format?
If you didn't use a framework or library of any kind and were programming at the raw TCP level, then yes you would be responsible for all the details of the HTTP protocol. But, hardly anybody other than library developers ever does this because frankly it's just a waste of time. Every single platform has at least one open source library that does this already and even if you were working on a brand new platform, you could go get an open source body of code and port it to your platform much quicker than you could write all this yourself.
Keep in mind that one of the HUGE advantages of node.js is that there's an enormous body of open source code (mostly in NPM and Github) already prepackaged to work with node.js. And, because node.js is server-side where code memory isn't usually tight and where code just comes from the local hard disk at server init time, there's little downside to grabbing a working and tested package that does what you already need, even if you're only going to use 5% of the functionality in the package. Or, worst case, clone an existing repository and modify it to perfectly suit your needs.
Is this because express is actually putting the response in the
correct HTTP format behind the scenes?
Yes, exactly, HTTP is so ubiquitous that almost all programming languages / frameworks handle the actual writing and parsing of HTTP behind the scenes.
Does anyone ever write web apps without a framework to do this. Would
you then be responsible for writing code that puts the server's
response into the exact HTTP format?
Never (unless you're writing code that needs very low level tweaking of HTTP code or something)

Modifying content delivered by node-http-proxy

Due to some limitations about the web services I am proxying, I have to inject some JS code so that it allows the iframe to access the parent window and perform some actions.
I have built a proxy system with node-http-proxy which works pretty nicely. However I have spent unmeasurable hours trying to modify the content (on my own, using harmon as well, etc) that is being sent to the user without any success. I have found some articles and even some questions here but all of them are outdated and are not useful anymore.
I was wondering if someone can give me an actual example about how to do this, because I am unable to do it and maybe it is just that it is impossible to do at this point?
I haven't tried harmon, but I did try cheerio and it works.
However, I used http-mitm-proxy and not node-http-proxy.
If you are using http-mitm-proxy, you need to return a promise in the response handler. Otherwise, the proxy continues to send the original response without picking up your changes.
I have recently written another proxy at:
https://github.com/noeltimothy/noelsproxy
I'm going to add response handling to this soon. This one uses a callback mechanism, which means it wont return the response until the caller signals it to.
You should be able to use 'cheerio' and alter the content in JQuery style.

How can Socket.io and RESTFul work together?

(I'm not familiar to RESTFul, please correct me if my concept is wrong)
In RESTFul architecture, we map every action to an URL. If I click "post a article", may it's actually URL http://example.com/ and some data action=post&content=blahblah.
If I want to post, but not refresh the whole web page, I can use javascript's XMLHTTPRequest. I post it and then get it's content and insert it to a div in my page. These action is all asynchronous.
Then I know there is something named WebSocket and it's wrapper socket.io. It use "message" to communicate between client and server. When I click "post" the client just call socket.send(data) and wait for server's client.send(data). It's magical. But how about URL?
It's possible to use the two model both without repeating myself? In other word, every action has it's URL, and some of them can interact with user real-timely(by socket.io?)
Moreover, should I do this? In a very interactive web program(ex. games), the RESTFul is still meaningful?
You're defining a handler for actions that map to REST over http. POST and GET generally refer to update and query over an entity. There's absolutely no reason you can't just define a handler for generic versions of these CRUD operations that can be used in both contexts. The way I generally do this is by introducing the concept of a 'route' to the real-time transport, and mapping those back to the same CRUD handlers.
You have a session, you can impose the same ACL, etc.
 +---------------------------------+
 |                                 |
 |      BROWSER                    |
 |                                 |
 +--+--^-------------------+---^---+
    |  |                   |   |
    |  |                   |   |
 +--v--+---+            +--v---+---+
 |         |            |          |
 | HTTP    |            | SOCKET.IO|
 +--+---^--+            +--+---^---+
    |   |                  |   |
 +--v---+------------------v---+---+
 |                                 |
 |        ROUTING/PUBSUB           |
 +-+--^-------+--^-------+--^------+
   |  |       |  |       |  |
 +-v--+--+  +-v--+--+  +-v--+-+
 |       |  |       |  |      |
 | USERS |  | ITEMS |  |ETC   |
 +-------+  +-------+  +------+
     ENTITY CRUD HANDLERS
I posted this on my blog recently:
Designing a CRUD API for WebSockets
When building Weld, we are using both REST and WebSockets (Socket.io). Three observations on WebSockets:
Since WebSockets are so free-form, you can name events how you want but it will eventually be impossible to debug.
WebSockets don’t have the request/response form of HTTP so sometimes it can be difficult to tell where an event is coming from, or going to.
It would be nice if the WebSockets could fit into the existing MVC structure in the app, preferably using the same controllers as the REST API.
My solution:
I have two routing files on my server: routes-rest.js and routes-sockets.js
My events look like this example: "AppServer/user/create".
I use forward slashes (“/”) to make the events look like routing paths.
The first string is the target (~”host name” if this actually was a path).
The second string is the model.
The third string is the CRUD verb: i.e. create, read, update, delete.

Resources