How can I pass windows authentication to webservice using jQuery?

Question

I'm using jQuery to call a .Net web service like this:

        var service_url = "https://mysite.com/myservice.asmx"
        $.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: service_url,
            dataType: "xml",
            data: "ParamId=" + FormId.value,
            processData: false,
            error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { ajaxError(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown); },
            success: function(xml) { DoSomething(xml); }
        });

Now I want to wrap "https://mysite.com/myservice.asmx" in Windows Authentication. How can I pass credentials to the service using jQuery/javascript?

Ideally I'd like to use the current user's credentials but if needed I can use 1 master credential for all service calls.

Answer 1

It seems that you need to set the request header with the base64 auth data manually.

The instructions are here: http://coderseye.com/2007/how-to-do-http-basic-auth-in-ajax.html

You first need to take the following code from here: http://www.webtoolkit.info/javascript-base64.html to do the base64 encoding

/**
*
*  Base64 encode / decode
*  http://www.webtoolkit.info/
*
**/

var Base64 = {

    // private property
    _keyStr : "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/=",

    // public method for encoding
    encode : function (input) {
     var output = "";
     var chr1, chr2, chr3, enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
     var i = 0;

     input = Base64._utf8_encode(input);

     while (i < input.length) {

      chr1 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
      chr2 = input.charCodeAt(i++);
      chr3 = input.charCodeAt(i++);

      enc1 = chr1 >> 2;
      enc2 = ((chr1 & 3) << 4) | (chr2 >> 4);
      enc3 = ((chr2 & 15) << 2) | (chr3 >> 6);
      enc4 = chr3 & 63;

      if (isNaN(chr2)) {
       enc3 = enc4 = 64;
      } else if (isNaN(chr3)) {
       enc4 = 64;
      }

      output = output +
      this._keyStr.charAt(enc1) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc2) +
      this._keyStr.charAt(enc3) + this._keyStr.charAt(enc4);

     }

     return output;
    },

    // public method for decoding
    decode : function (input) {
     var output = "";
     var chr1, chr2, chr3;
     var enc1, enc2, enc3, enc4;
     var i = 0;

     input = input.replace(/[^A-Za-z0-9\+\/\=]/g, "");

     while (i < input.length) {

      enc1 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
      enc2 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
      enc3 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));
      enc4 = this._keyStr.indexOf(input.charAt(i++));

      chr1 = (enc1 << 2) | (enc2 >> 4);
      chr2 = ((enc2 & 15) << 4) | (enc3 >> 2);
      chr3 = ((enc3 & 3) << 6) | enc4;

      output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr1);

      if (enc3 != 64) {
       output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr2);
      }
      if (enc4 != 64) {
       output = output + String.fromCharCode(chr3);
      }

     }

     output = Base64._utf8_decode(output);

     return output;

    },

    // private method for UTF-8 encoding
    _utf8_encode : function (string) {
     string = string.replace(/\r\n/g,"\n");
     var utftext = "";

     for (var n = 0; n < string.length; n++) {

      var c = string.charCodeAt(n);

      if (c < 128) {
       utftext += String.fromCharCode(c);
      }
      else if((c > 127) && (c < 2048)) {
       utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 6) | 192);
       utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
      }
      else {
       utftext += String.fromCharCode((c >> 12) | 224);
       utftext += String.fromCharCode(((c >> 6) & 63) | 128);
       utftext += String.fromCharCode((c & 63) | 128);
      }

     }

     return utftext;
    },

    // private method for UTF-8 decoding
    _utf8_decode : function (utftext) {
     var string = "";
     var i = 0;
     var c = c1 = c2 = 0;

     while ( i < utftext.length ) {

      c = utftext.charCodeAt(i);

      if (c < 128) {
       string += String.fromCharCode(c);
       i++;
      }
      else if((c > 191) && (c < 224)) {
       c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
       string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 31) << 6) | (c2 & 63));
       i += 2;
      }
      else {
       c2 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+1);
       c3 = utftext.charCodeAt(i+2);
       string += String.fromCharCode(((c & 15) << 12) | ((c2 & 63) << 6) | (c3 & 63));
       i += 3;
      }

     }

     return string;
    }

}

Then you'll need the code to construct the auth data, it's just a base64 of the user and password:

function make_base_auth(user, password) {
  var tok = user + ':' + password;
  var hash = Base64.encode(tok);
  return "Basic " + hash;
}

And then you just add the header with jQuery before making the request:

    var service_url = "https://mysite.com/myservice.asmx"
    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: service_url,
        dataType: "xml",
        data: "ParamId=" + FormId.value,
        processData: false,
        beforeSend : function(req) {
             req.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 
                   make_base_auth ('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'));
        },
        error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {   
             ajaxError(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown); 
        },
        success: function(xml) { DoSomething(xml); }
    });