Ruby on Rails

Hi all,

I am encountering some unexpected behavior in the Rails 3.0.0.rc which
I think may be incorrect.

In my controller, I have the following:

 class FeedsController < ApplicationController
   def recent
     respond_to do |format|
       format.atom
     end
   end
 end

Likewise, I have a view (feeds/recent.atom.builder):

 xml.tag!('feed', :xmlns => "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom") do
   xml.text!("...")
 end

and I have a route:

 match('feeds/recent'  => 'feeds#recent')

If I try to fetch this with no Accept header, I get a 406 error:

 $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept:"
 HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
 [ ... ]

This is probably not correct, since RFC 2616 (sec 14.1) reads:

| If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the
| client accepts all media types.

Moving on.

If I try to fetch this with an "Accept: */*" header or "Accept:
application/atom+xml", it works as expected. Likewise all works well
if I use an "Accept: */*, text/html" header

However, if I change the order of the formats, to "Accept: text/html,
*/*", I get a 406:

 $ curl -i http://localhost:3000/feeds/recent -H "Accept: text/html, */*"
 HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
 [ ... ]

But a "text/html, */*" Accept header should be equivalent to a "*/*,
text/html" header, since order does not matter. (This is a contrived,
but similar Accept headers are used by Firefox, with q values.)

Getting further into the bowels of RFC 2616, an "Accept:
application/*" header gives me a 406, when it should be acceptable,
because I have a response of type "application/atom+xml".

One final thing. I add a format.any entry to the controller (I am not
entirely sure the meaning of this):

 def recent
   respond_to do |format|
     format.atom
     format.any
   end
 end

And now I get a 200 with "Accept: */*" and "Accept:
application/atom+xml", but template errors with any other Accept
header including a "*/*".

Does anybody have any thoughts about this? It does not seem to me that
Rails is not doing the right thing here.

best, Erik Hetzner

Sent from my free software system <http://fsf.org/>.