Azure AD B2C Custom Policy Localized REST API Conflict Response - azure-active-directory

This is sort of an extension of this question here. I have a policy that calls a REST API. The API returns an error message and this message needs to be localized.
One way is to of course get the API to return a localized message, but is there a way for the CustomPolicy itself to localize the error code? According to the CustomPolicy Docs, a REST API can send an error code along with the Conflict error code. Our thinking was to use this error code as a key and select a localized message (from the messageValue enum mentioned in the answer in the link).
However, we can't seem to capture/handle the error data returned by the API. The Policy seems to handle error codes by itself and we would like to know if it is possible to inject localized exception/error messages from the policy itself.
Thanks in advance!
Edit: A little more information about the setup. We have a TechnicalProfile that has a DisplayWidget and a ValidationTechnicalProfile. The DisplayWidget is used for entering & verifying the user's phone/email and the ValidationTechnicalProfile makes the final call to the RestAPI with all the user's information to register him/her. This RestAPI call output is what we want to localize.
The suggestion in the linked SO question, from what I understand, is that we integrate another DisplayClaim (that references an enum) in the DisplayWidget, and depending on the ErrorCode returned by the call, change it to display the appropriate code. However, as per my understanding, this would also require editing the API to return only 200 along with a code. This code would indicate the true nature of the result - success or a code for one of the enums to be displayed.
Our aim therefore is to check if there is a way to follow the Policy's flow (disrupt the SignUp/SignIn process) but at the same time localize the API's displayed response.

We managed to find a workaround to this, so I'm posting this here for anyone else who might be interested in this.
Our restriction for localizations was the fact that used Phrase to manage our translations and wanted the CustomPolicy specific translations all in one place. Our CD workflow was as follows:
PolicyCommit -> Build Variable Replacement through PS -> Release Variable Replacement and localized strings replacement through PS & Policy Uploads
Barring the policy from localizing the APIs response, we had the following options to achieve this:
Sending the language to the API and having the API return the appropriate error message
in the appropriate language. We were reluctant to follow this because of a multitude of reasons, but mostly because we would also have to handle different regions, etc. in the API - something the policy does by itself.
We actually had only one API that we called, and also only two error messages that were used. Hence we created an enum with the two error messages that would be localized. We then used a chain of InputClaimsTransformations that did the following:
Repeat Steps 1 through 3 for all the errors
1. CreateStringClaim (Create ClaimTypes for each of the error codes, holding the index of the error code in the enum)
2. GetMappedValueFromLocalizedCollection (Make the localized enum choose and hold the value of the required error code)
3. AddItemToStringCollection (Add the localized error from the enum to a StringCollection)
4. GenerateJson (Add the error codes StringCollection to the JSON payload to be sent to the API)
This way, the policy performed the localization for all the errors and we sent them along with the request to the API. The API, when an error occurred, picked one of the error messages from the policy and sent it back. This method was for us, because of our CD structure and Phrase integration, much easier than actually having the translations in a file hosted on the cloud to be accessed by the API.
Hope this helps someone; I can also add code in case someone needs it :)

Related

APEX Rest API - Swagger

I am a bit new to the whole APEX service plugins but I was wondering if Salesforce has native support for Swagger, or any similar REST description language, for the REST api's that I create in the APEX service platform?
For example:
#RestResource(urlMapping='/v1/users/*')
global with sharing class UserRestService {
...
#HttpGet
global static List<Member__c> doGet(....)
{
...
}
}
I would like the ability to return the swagger json, a WADL document, or something for this REST service (and all other REST services I have in there). Does anyone know of a way I can do this?
Thanks in advance!
There is no built in support at this time. I was interested in seeing what could be done via currently available public APIs. The first thing I ran into is the grammar does not seem to like parameters to HttpGet methods. That right there will make it challenging since the only way to get input parameters appears to be via the Request entity which means you would have to parse the actual code. In other words, there does not appear to be declarative input binding.
Further, in looking at the tooling API which let's me get some amount of "reflective" information about the class, there is not always sufficient information to render a response payload (in your case, it just shows LIST but not what's in the list)
Again, it looks like one would have to rely on a parser (there is at least one Antl grammar floating around).
(this is getting some internal attention but I can't say any more at this time)

Best practices for model validation using a REST API and a javascript front-end such as Angular

I'm transitioning towards more responsive front-end web apps and I have a question about model validation. Here's the set-up: the server has a standard REST API for inserting, updating, retrieving, etc. This could be written in Node or Java Spring, it doesn't matter. The front-end is written with something like Angular (or similar).
What I need is to figure out where to put the validation code. Here's the requirements:
All validation code should be written in one place only. Not both client and server. this implies that it should reside on the server, inside the REST API when persisting.
The front-end should be capable of understanding validation errors from the server and associating them to the particular field that caused the error. So if the field "username" is mandatory, the client can place an error next to that field saying "Username is mandatory".
It should be possible to validate correct variable types. So if we were expecting a number or a date and got a string instead, the error would be something like "'Yo' is not a correct date."
The error messages should be localized to the user's language.
Can anyone help me out? I need something simple and robust.
Thanks
When validating your input and it fails you can return a response in appropriate format (guessing you use JSON) to contain the error messages along with a proper HTTP error code.
Just working on a project with a Symfony backend, using FOSRestBundle to provide proper REST API. Using the form component of Symfony whenever there's a problem with the input a well structured JSON response is generated with error messages mapped to the fields or the top level if for example there's unexpected input.
After much research I found a solution using the Meteor.js platform. Since it's a pure javascript solution running on both the server and the client, you can define scripts once and have them run on both the client and the server.
From the official Meteor documentation:
Files outside the client, server and tests subdirectories are loaded on both the client and the server! That's the place for model definitions and other functions.
Wow. Defining models and validation scripts only once is pretty darn cool if you ask me. Also, there's no need to map between JSON and whatever server-side technology. Plus, no ORM mapping to get it in the DB. Nice!
Again, from the docs:
In Meteor, the client and server share the same database API. The same exact application code — like validators and computed properties — can often run in both places. But while code running on the server has direct access to the database, code running on the client does not. This distinction is the basis for Meteor's data security model.
Sounds good to me. Here's the last little gem:
Input validation: Meteor allows your methods and publish functions to take arguments of any JSON type. (In fact, Meteor's wire protocol supports EJSON, an extension of JSON which also supports other common types like dates and binary buffers.) JavaScript's dynamic typing means you don't need to declare precise types of every variable in your app, but it's usually helpful to ensure that the arguments that clients are passing to your methods and publish functions are of the type that you expect.
Anyway, sounds like I've found the a solution to the problem. If anyone else knows of a way to define validation once and have it run on both client and server please post an answer below, I'd love to hear it.
Thanks all.
To be strict, your last gate keeper of validation for any CRUD operations is of course on server-side. I do not know what is your concern that you should handle your validation on one end only(either server or client), but usually doing on both sides is better for both user experience and performance.
Say your username field is a mandatory field. This field can be easily handled in front-end side; before a user click submit and then been sent to the server and then get returned and shows the error code. You can save that round trip with a one liner code in front-end.
Of course, one may argue that from client-side the bad guys may manipulate the data and thus bypassing the front-end validation. That goes to my first point - your final gate keeper in validation should be on your server-side. That's why, data integrity is still the server's job. Make sure whatever that goes into your database is clean, dry and valid.
To answer you question, (biased opinion though) AngularJS is still a pretty awesome framework to let you do front-end validation, as well as providing a good way to do server-side error handling.

Backbone.js Error Handling - how do you do it?

I'm wondering how people typically do error handling with backbone.js. It would be nice for something to popup everytime I call model.save (which in turn calls Backbone.sync). The thing is, how does backbone.js know when an error or a success has occurred on the server? I understand it would know if there was a 500 server error or something like that (which jquery knows about since Backbone.sync calls jQuery.ajax) - but I want to be able to pass messages and other codes so I can give more meaningful error messages to the user.
I have one idea and would love some feedback. The idea is to override Backbone.sync. The new sync gets a response from the server, which must be in a particular format. This format would be something like:
ServerResponseObject:
> ResponseCode
> Message
> Model
Nothing fancy, but basically, instead of just returning the plain model, it is wrapped up with a ResponseCode and Message which can be shown to the user.
Is this the normal way to do it? Any other approach that is better?
Thanks!
In my ears this sounds a bit on the complex side, at least to start with. Backbone.sync will already report errors that you can catch in your models .save() method:
this.mymodel.save(/* ... */, {success: function(model, result, xhr)...,
error: function(model, xhr, options)...}
(docs).
If your serverside follows HTTP specs well, the error code is already provided (500 - server error, 404 - model not found, you know..), and even if the server sends an error code it can still send content (perfect for your message). So you basically already have all parameters built in to the HTTP protocol itself. In my experience you get to write less code if you work with the protocol instead of building new layers on top of it.
In your errorcallback above, you probably have good possibilities to call the rest of your system and post an error to some application message bus or similar (via Backbones own event mechanism or some dedicated library).
We switched to sending back the standard format JSend a while back. It's basically just a JSON wrapper around the response that has provisions for messages and error codes to come back in addition to the data you expect.
The main reason we had to do it was because we had services which were responding with 400 errors when it was really not the appropriate thing. The client didn't have malformed syntax or any protocol level errors at all, there was just some problem with something where we needed a more nuanced response and that gave it to us. After we did that everybody ended up much happier on both the client and server sides.

Handling DataAccessException in Spring Security

Right now I've got Spring Security protecting an application using basic authentication. The user details are coming from a JDBC source. If the database goes down, the internals of the user loading mechanism will throw a DataAccessException. The default authentication provider class, DaoAuthenticationProvider, catches the exception and maps it back to an AuthenticationServiceException. The end result of such a mapping is that the browser/client receives HTTP code 401.
What I want to do is to handle database unavailability in a different way. At the very least, I want this to be handled by responding with HTTP 503 but I would prefer if it redirected to an error page. How can I achieve this?
EDIT: Ritesh's solution was partially correct. The missing steps apart from implementing your own Basic entry point is to also use v3.0.3 of the security schema so that the <http-basic/> element has the entry-point-ref attribute. If you don't use this special attribute, the default Basic filter will always use its own Basic entry point implementation.
The BasicAuthenticationEntryPoint sends 401 for AuthenticationException. You can create your own custom entry point to handle AuthenticationServiceException and send out 503.
Other option is not to do anything in entry point and use SimpleMappingExceptionResolver and/or implement your own HandlerExceptionResolver.

HTTP Error 405 Method not allowed error in admin log

I'm getting a strange error in my newly deployed application in appengine. In the error log it tells me that PageRank, TwitterBot and a couple of others. I would guess this is due to these try to get data using ajax or another async service resulting in "same origin policy"-problem.
My question is does anyone know what these bots are trying to get? For example if pagerank (google page rank I would guess) can't get any info about my application would this effect my page rank. And anyone know what the twitterbot does? And if there is away to handle to provide a proper response?
Most likely, your RequestHandlers (I'm assuming you're using python with webapp from the tags on your earlier questions) aren't implementing a method for whichever request method the bots are using. I'd guess they're HEAD requests, and you have no head() methods defined.

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