How to emulate a real http request via cfhttp?

Question

Hi,

I need to emulate a real http request via cfhttp. I was getting rss feed with ColdFusion, but tonight they started to block my request and send an index page in response instead of rss fead.

I added useragent for cfhttp, but it doesn't help.

Opera, Firefox and Chrome open feed correctly from the same computer.

Answer 1

I would guess that the site with the RSS feed is sniffing the User Agent still, and the CFHTTP one isn't set to one that the site is using. Use a HTTP Proxy Sniffer (ie Charles HTTP Proxy) to record the HTTP request of a browser that is displaying the RSS feed correctly, then try using CFHTTP with the same User Agent string as a previously successful request.

If it still doesn't work, use the 'proxyport' and 'proxyserver' attributes of CFHTTP to run the ColdFusion request through your HTTP sniffer and check to make sure the User Agent is being set correctly and compare to a working request.

Answer 2

Yep, thanks. I sniffed all HTTP headers which browser sends to the site and then emulated them in cfhttp request. The solution is:

<cfhttp url="http://example.com/feed" 
useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.391.0 Safari/533.7"
result="httpresult"
redirect="false"
>
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="HTTP_REFERER" value="http://example.com/feed/" >
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept-Encoding" value="gzip,deflate,sdch" >
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Proxy-Connection" value="keep-alive" >
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept" value="application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5">
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept-Language" value="en-US,en;q=0.8">
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept-Charset" value="ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3">
<cfhttpparam type="cookie" name="some-cookie" value="1">