CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyformsrequestform-submit
Alex.Bullard
Alex.Bullard

Reputation: 5563

Submit POST data from controller to another website in Rails

  1. User submits a form with some basic data.

  2. The data is received and treated by an action in the controller and more information that needs to remain private is added.

  3. Then I need to send a post request to an external website with all of the combined data from the controller.

What is the best way to do this?

Upvotes: 54

Views: 80275

Answers (5)

soundly_typed
soundly_typed

Reputation: 40386

If you want to send JSON, all you need is something like the following (tested in Rails 6):

Net::HTTP.post(
  URI('https://example.com/some/path'),
  { "this is the": "request body" }.to_json,
  'Content-Type' => 'application/json'
)

Upvotes: 1

Vlad Zloteanu
Vlad Zloteanu

Reputation: 8512

The simpliest way is using ruby core library:

require "uri"
require "net/http"

params = {'box1' => 'Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor. -Emily Post',
'button1' => 'Submit'
}
x = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse('http://www.interlacken.com/webdbdev/ch05/formpost.asp'), params)
puts x.body

Pro Tip: Do an asynchronous request, using a gem like delayed_job or background_rb

Upvotes: 88

askegg
askegg

Reputation: 664

If the external server is RESTful, then simply create an ActiveResource model to handle your data.

Upvotes: 13

Alex.Bullard
Alex.Bullard

Reputation: 5563

Sorry, I neglected to mention that I was connecting to secure server. This seems to have been the reason that I was getting end of file errors. Adding using 'net/https' and calling use_ssl on connection solved the problem. Thanks for everyones help.

require 'net/https'
require 'open-uri'

url = URI.parse('https://MY_URL')
req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
req.form_data = data
req.basic_auth url.user, url.password if url.user
con = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
con.use_ssl = true
con.start {|http| http.request(req)}

This is based off the source for the post_form method, so i guess I'll give vlad.zloteanu the answer.

Upvotes: 34

ErsatzRyan
ErsatzRyan

Reputation: 3043

I don't think redirect_to handles post requests because it uses http 302 (?) which just GETs the other page.

I believe you can do something like this

Class MyController < ActionController
    require 'net/http'

    def my_method
        #do something with the data/model

        my_connection = Net::HTTP.new('www.target.com', 80)
        reponse = my_connection.post(path_within_url, data)

        #do something with response if you want
    end

end

note: this is air coded and has not been tried or tested

Upvotes: 6

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