EXSLT 2.0 module - HTTP client

1 Introduction

1.1 Namespace conventions

The module defined by this document does define one function in the namespace http://www.exslt.org/v2/http-client. In this document, the http prefix, when used, is bound to this namespace URI.

1.2 Error management

Error conditions are identified by a code (a QName.) When such an error condition is reached in the evaluation of an expression, an dynamic error is thrown, with the corresponding error code (as if the standard XPath function error had been called.) TODO: Have not been defined yet.

2 The `http:send-request` function

This module defines an XPath extension function that sends an HTTP request and return the corresponding response. It supports HTTP multi-part messages. Here is the signature of this function:

http:send-request($uri as xs:string?,
                  $request as element(http:request)?,
                  $content as item()?,
                  $serial as item()?) as item()+

$uri is the HTTP or HTTPS URI to send the request to. It is an xs:anyURI, but is declared as a string to be able to pass literal strings (without requiring to explicitly cast it to an xs:anyURI.)

$content is the request body content, for HTTP methods that can contain a body in the request (POST and PUT.) This is an error if this param is not the empty sequence for other methods (DELETE, GET, HEAD and OPTIONS.)

$request contains the various parameters of the request, for instance the HTTP method to use or the HTTP headers. Among other things, it can also contain the other param's values: the URI, the content and the serialization option. If they are not set as parameter to the function, their value in $request, if any, is used instead. See the following section for the detailed definition of the http:request element.

$serial defines the serialization option to serialize the content to the HTTP request. It can be either a serialization method (a string, either 'xml', 'html', 'xhtml' or 'text',) the name of an output definition (a string, which is the name of a named xsl:output instruction,) or an xsl:output element itself. The content is then serialized accordingly to the chosen method or xsl:output regarding [Serialization].

Besides the 4-params signature above, there are 3 other signatures that are convenient shortcuts (corresponding to the full version in which corresponding params have been set to the empty sequence.) They are:

http:send-request($request as element(http:request)) as item()+
http:send-request($uri as xs:string?,
                  $request as element(http:request)?) as item()+
http:send-request($uri as xs:string?,
                  $request as element(http:request)?,
                  $content as item()?) as item()+

3 Sending a request

The functions defined in this module make one able to send a request to an HTTP server and receive the corresponding response. Here is how the request is represented by the parameters to this function, and how they are used to generate the actual HTTP request to send.

3.1 The request elements

The http:request element represents all the needed information to send the HTTP request. So it is always possible to create such an element that will carry over all the needed info for a particular request. For some of those values though, you can use an additional param instead. For instance, some signatures define the parameter $uri. If the value of this parameter is not the empty sequence, it will then be used instead of the value of the attribute href on the http:request element.

<http:request method = NCName
              href? = anyURI
              status-only? = boolean
              username? = string
              password? = string
              auth-method? = string
              send-authorization? = boolean
              override-content-type? = string
              follow-redirect? = boolean>
   (http:header*,
     (http:multipart|
      http:body)?)
</http:request>

method is the HTTP verb to use, as GET, POST, etc. It is case insensitive
href is the URI the request has to be sent to. It can be overridden by the parameter $uri
status-only control how the response will look like; if it is true, only the status code and the headers are returned, the content is not (no http:body nor http:multipart, nor the interpreted additional value in the returned sequence, see hereafter.)
username, password, auth-method and send-authorization are used for authentication (see section below.)
override-content-type is a MIME type. It can be used only with http:request, and will override the Content-Type header returned by the server.
follow-redirect control whether an HTTP redirect is automatically followed or not. If it is false, the HTTP redirect is returned as the response. If it is true (the default) the function tries to follow the redirect, by sending the same request to the new address (including body, headers, and authentication credentials.) Maximum one redirect is followed (there is no attempt to follow a redirect in response to following a first redirect.)
http:header represent an HTTP header, either in the http:request or in the http:response elements, as defined below.
http:multipart represents a multi-part body, either in a request or a response, as defined below.
http:body represents a multi-part body, either in a request or a response, as defined below. It can be overridden by the parameter $content (the way $content is used to build the body can be controlled by the parameter $serial, see section below for details.)

<http:header name = string
             value = string/>

The http:header element represents an HTTP header, either in a request or in a response.

<http:body content-type = string
           encoding? = string
           id? = string
           description? = string
           href? = string>
   any*
</http:body>

The http:body element represents the body of either an HTTP request or of an HTTP response (in multi-part requests and responses, it represents the body of a single one part.)

The content-type and encoding attributes are used to control the way the content of this element is used to create the HTTP request (how it is serialized to the request content.) See section below for details. The id attribute specifies the value of the HTTP header Content-ID and description the value of the HTTP header Content-Description. The href attribute can be used in a request to set the body content as the content of the linked resource instead of using the children of the http:body element (children of this element and the href attribute are mutually exclusive.)

<http:multipart content-type = string
                boundary = string>
   (http:header*,
    http:body)+
</http:multipart>

The http:multipart element represents an HTTP multi-part request or response. The content-type attribute is the media type of the whole request or response, and has to be a multipart media type (that is, its main type must be multipart.) The boundary attribute is the boundary marker used to separate the several parts in the message (the value of the attribute is prefixed with "--" to form the actual boundary marker in the request; on the other way, this prefix is removed from the boundary marker in the response to set the value of the attribute.)

3.2 Serializing the request content

If the request can have content (one body or several body parts,) it can be specified by the http:multipart element, the http:body element, and/or the parameter $content. If $content is not the empty sequence, it replaces the value of the http:body element (in multipart, if there are several bodies, exactly one http:body must be empty.) For each body, the content of the HTTP body is generated as follow.

The parameter $serial is used to control the way the content is serialized. This parameter can be an xsl:output element, as defined in [XSLT 2.0], and the serialization is defined in [Serialization]. $serial can also be a string, either 'xml', 'html', 'xhtml' or 'text' (other values are implementation-defined, as explained in the above mentioned recommendations.) (Note: $serial should be able to be a function item too, when EXSLT will have defined the corresponding module.) If $serial is the empty sequence, the default value for this parameter depends on the content-type of the body: it is 'xml' if it is an XML media type, 'html' if it is an HTML media type, 'xhtml' if it is application/xhtml+xml or 'text' for any other case.

3.3 Authentication

HTTP authentication when sending a request is controlled by the attributes username, password, auth-method and send-authorization on the element http:request. If username has a value, password and auth-method must have a value too. And if any one of the three other attributes have been set, username must be set too.

The attribute auth-method can be either "Basic" or "Digest", but other values can also be used, in an implementation-defined way. The handling of those attributes must be done in conformance to [RFC 2617]. If send-authorization is true (default value is false) and the authentication method supports generating the header Authorization without challenge, the request contains this header. The default value is to send a non-authenticated request, and if the response is an authentication challenge, then only send the credentials in a second message.

4 Dealing with the response

After having sent the request to the HTTP server, the function waits for the response. It analyses it and returns a sequence representing this response. This sequence has an http:response element as first item, which is followed be an additional item for each body or body part in the response.

4.1 The result element

<http:response status = integer>
   (http:header*,
     (http:multipart |
      http:body)?)
</http:response>

This is the first item returned by the function defined in this module. The status attribute is the HTTP status code returned by the server. The http:header elements are as defined for the request, but represent instead the response headers. The http:body and http:multipart elements are also like in the request, but http:body elements must be empty.

4.2 Representing the result content

Instead of being inserted within the http:response element, the content of each body is returned as a single item in the return sequence. Each item is in the same order (after the http:response element) than the http:body elements. For each body, the way this item is built from the HTTP response is as follow.

If the status-only attribute has the value true (default is false,) the returned sequence will only contain the http:response element (with the headers, but also the empty http:body or http:multipart elements, as if status-only was false,) and the following items, representing the bodies content are not generated from the HTTP response.

For each body that has to be interpreted, the following rules apply in order to build the corresponding item. If the body media type is a text media type, the item is a string, containing the body content. If the media type is an XML media type, the content is parsed and the item is the resulting document node. If the media type is an HTML type, the content is tidied up and parsed (this process is implementation-dependant) and the item is the resulting document node. If this is a binary media type, the content is returned as a base64Binary item. From the previous rules, a result item can then be either a document node (from XML or HTML,) a string or a base64Binary.

If the attribute override-content-type is set on the request, its value is used instead of the content-type returned by the HTTP server (TODO: how does it fit with multipart responses?)

5 Content types handling

In both requests and responses, MIME type strings are used to choose the way the entity content has to be respectively serialized or parsed. Four different kinds of type are defined here, which are used in the above text about sending request and receiving response. The intent is to provide the spirit of the entity content handling regarding its content type, but an implementation is encouraged to deviate from those rules if it is obvious that a particular type should be treated in a specific way (normally, that would be the case only to treat a binary type as another type.)

An XML media type has a MIME type of text/xml, application/xml, text/xml-external-parsed-entity, or application/xml-external-parsed-entity, as defined in [RFC 3023] (except that application/xml-dtd is considered a text media type.) MIME types ending by +xml are also XML media types.
An HTML media type has a MIME type of text/html.
Text media types are the remaining types beginning with text/.
Binary types are all the other types. An implementation can treat some of those binary types as either an XML, HTML or text media type if it is more appropriate (this is implementation-defined.)