REST, Basic Authentication, Jersey, Poster, and Sharepoint

[Brian Mulholland]

So my project is getting ready to write a REST client and service that interfaces with sharepoint and other things. We're writing in Jersey (JAX-RS). I have a test service and client that talk to each other perfectly. But as I try to interface with sharepoint's REST API, things go awry. The Sharepoint service requires basic auth, but when we aim Poster or RESTClient (firefox add-ons) or my client at them, it fails. It returns a 200 error, but the response is HTML that says there was an internal error. I've assumed Poster would be doing everything right, and our issues were in sharepoint, but when i pointed poster at my service, it also didn't work.

I found a couple of issues posted online about poster implying that it does not set the headers, despite there being fields there implying it would. I'm a bit confused by these. I have to know that Poster is doing it right or else I can't know that my service or client are doing it right.

http://code.google.com/p/poster-extension/issues/detail?id=15
http://code.google.com/p/poster-extension/issues/detail?id=48

relevant snippets from the jersey service (very early stages of testing the plumbing)

		List<String> authentication = headers.getRequestHeader("authorization");
		if(authentication == null)
			throw new WebApplicationException(Response.status(Status.UNAUTHORIZED).entity("This REST service requires BASIC authentication").type("text/plain").build());
		
		String header = authentication.get(0);
		header = header.substring("Basic ".length());
		String[] creds = new String(Base64.base64Decode(header)).split(":");
		if(creds[0].equalsIgnoreCase("testuser") && creds[1].equals("testpass"))
			return true;
		else
			throw new WebApplicationException(Response.status(Status.UNAUTHORIZED).entity("Invalid username/password combination").type("text/plain").build());

snippets from the client

		ClientConfig config = new DefaultClientConfig();
		Client client = Client.create(config);
		//this is how we add basic auth
		client.addFilter(new HTTPBasicAuthFilter("testuser", "testpass"));
		WebResource service = client.resource(getBaseURI());

So I guess the question is whether simply putting the user id and password in the "User Auth" fields below the URL in poster should be basic authentication. And I wonder if what you see in the client and service are right for basic authentication.

[Brian Mulholland]

Just to clarify, Poster works with neither MY service nor sharepoint basic auth, but RESTClient works with my service, not sharepoint.