Weird "406 not acceptable" error

Question

When I try to hit this action via Javascript, I get a 406 Not Acceptable error:

  def show
    @annotation = Annotation.find_by_id(params[:id])

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {
         if @annotation.blank?
           redirect_to root_path
         else
           redirect_to inline_annotation_path(@annotation)
         end
       }

       format.js {
         if params[:format] == "raw"
           render :text => @annotation.body.to_s
         else
           render :text => @annotation.body.to_html
         end
       }
    end
  end

This is from jQuery, but I'm doing the right beforeSend stuff:

  $.ajaxSetup({ 
    beforeSend: function(xhr) {
      xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "text/javascript");
    },
    cache: false 
  });

Here are my request headers:

Host    localhost:3000
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Accept  text/javascript
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  300
Connection  keep-alive
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest
Content-Type    application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Answer 1

Is this served through Apache? You may want to take a look at http://forums.alwayswebhosting.com/showthread.php?p=8381, which describes scenarios where security policy interferes with requests.

EDIT: The URL referenced above advocates turning off request-sniffing security policy across an entire site, which makes the site vulnerable. Setting the SecFilterEngine option to Off in the .htaccess, which is what is prescribed in the URL, should be done only to zero in on the source of the problem. It should not be considered a long term solution.

Answer 2

If you are using jRails this was causing a lot of problems for me, here is my application.js file:

$(document).ready(function () {
    $.ajaxSetup({
     beforeSend: function (xhr) {
      xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, text/xml, */*");
     }
    });
});

Answer 3

Can you try without setting the Accept Header? It should actually work even without the Accept header.

Answer 4

I cracked the case!

I was sending a format parameter with my get request in order to tell the server to send me markdown instead of HTML. Here's my Javascript:

$.get("/annotations/" + annotation_id, {format: 'raw'}, function(data) {
});

and then I was looking for this parameter in the format.js block:

   format.js {
     if params[:format] == "raw"
       render :text => @annotation.body.to_s
     else
       render :text => @annotation.body.to_html
     end
   }

but apparently a format parameter confuses the respond_to block. I changed it from {format: 'raw'} to {markdown: 'true'} and it works.

I guess this is a bug in Rails?

Answer 5

For me it was a simple before_filter that was restricting a action that renders a js file, once I added the :except => [:action] to the before_filter block it was fine.

Answer 6

include "format.js" in your respond_to block