I'm designing an API that allows the user to authenticate (using tokens) and that contains redirects within the same domain. Now, for an unauthenticated request to an endpoint that returns 303,
GET /documents/123 --> 303 redirect to `/documents/abc`
GET /documents/abc --> 200
everything works out nicely.
Let's do an authenticated request to the same endpoint where the Authorization
header is sent. This makes the request a preflighted request and the browser does a preflight OPTIONS
request, i.e.
OPTIONS /documents/123 --> 204 (everything okay, please proceed)
GET /documents/123 --> 303 redirect to `/documents/abc`
At this point, instead of GET
ting the actual resource at /documents/abc
, the browser yields
XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://localhost:8000/people/username/nschloe.
The request was redirected to 'http://localhost:8000/people/YDHa-B2FhMie',
which is disallowed for cross-origin requests that require preflight.
This behavior is in accordance with the standard:
7.1.5 Cross-Origin Request with Preflight
If the response has an HTTP status code that is not in the 2xx range
Apply the network error steps.
This seems to mean that one cannot do redirects for authenticated resources, even if the redirect is on the same domain (localhost
).
Can this really be true? Is there a common workaround?
The original standard does preclude redirect after a successful CORS preflight. Quoting § 7.1.5.3:
This is the actual request. Apply the make a request steps and observe the request rules below while making the request.
- If the response has an HTTP status code of 301, 302, 303, 307, or 308 Apply the cache and network error steps.
Due to your efforts (thanks!), on August 4 the standard was updated to allow redirect after successful CORS preflight check.
Until browsers catch up, the only feasible options seem to be one or a combination of:
Location
header as the "proxy". Be prepared for limited browser support, as 305 is deprecated.meta refresh
and/or Javascript Location
change.iframe
with the redirect target as the iframe's source.