{"id":271,"date":"2011-06-18T11:39:01","date_gmt":"2011-06-18T11:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2011-06-18T11:41:35","modified_gmt":"2011-06-18T11:41:35","slug":"http-post-oauth-coldfusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/http-post-oauth-coldfusion\/","title":{"rendered":"HTTP Post doesn’t work – OAuth 2.0 – Google – ColdFusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent many wasted hours this morning debugging a Google OAuth 2.0 response error, and felt foolish when I discovered what I was missing – the content-type header.<\/p>\n

After doing some testing, it appears that some HTTP clients, such as curl<\/a>, automatically assign an appropriate content-type header for you.<\/p>\n

ColdFusions's CFHTTP does not. But ColdFusion is not to blame – the developer knows the type of content they are posting better than any server can take a guess at.<\/p>\n

If you're posting to a service, for example, attempting to retrive an OAuth 2.0 access token, the error message returned may not always indicate that the server doesn't understand your content type.<\/p>\n

For instance, I would receive the following error from Google's OAuth 2.0, which is what inspired me to write this post:<\/p>\n

Required parameter is missing: grant_type<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you happen to run into the same issue with Google OAuth 2.0, keep these<\/span> 3 things in mind:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Google expects your authorization code, client id, client_secret, grant_type and redirect uri to be in the body<\/strong> of the POST request, not in the headers.<\/li>\n
  2. Google expects a content-type<\/strong> of application\/x-www-form-urlencoded<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  3. Be sure to Url Encode<\/strong> the client_secret<\/em> and authorization code<\/em>. Url Encode all parameters to be safe.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    While both are in the Google OAuth 2.0 documentation<\/a>, they don't really stand out.
    \n\t<\/span><\/p>\n

    So, in the end, if you're a friend to ColdFusion, or can at least make sense of the code, this may help:<\/span><\/p>\n

    <cffunction name="getAccessToken">
    \n\t    <cfargument name="code" required="false" default="" type="string">
    \n\t    <cfset postBody = "code=" & UrlEncodedFormat(arguments.code) & "&">
    \n\t    <cfset postBody = postBody & "client_id=" & UrlEncodedFormat(variables.client_id) & "&">
    \n\t    <cfset postBody = postBody & "client_secret=" & UrlEncodedFormat(variables.client_secret) & "&">
    \n\t    <cfset postBody = postBody & "redirect_uri=" & UrlEncodedFormat(variables.callback) & "&">
    \n\t    <cfset postBody = postBody & "grant_type=authorization_code">
    \n\t    <cfhttp method="post" url="https:\/\/accounts.google.com\/o\/oauth2\/token">
    \n\t        <cfhttpparam name="Content-Type" type="header" value="application\/x-www-form-urlencoded">
    \n\t        <cfhttpparam type="body" value="#postBody#">
    \n\t    <\/cfhttp>
    \n\t<\/cffunction><\/p>\n

    \t<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I spent many wasted hours this morning debugging a Google OAuth 2.0 response error, and felt foolish when I discovered what I was missing –…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":""},"categories":[77,34],"tags":[96],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}