CORS - CakePHP does not accept AngularJS JSON-Request - angularjs

Question

I'm using CakePHP as backend and AngularJS as frontend, whereas front- & backend are in different domains so this is basically a CORS-situation.
Basically I'm trying to send the contents of a form to a Cake-API (later this is meant to do authentication part - but I'm failing earlier) via $http.post. So here is the code:
aeapBackend.login = function(username, password) {
return $http.post(
API_URL + 'api_mobile_user/login', {
test: username,
test2: password
}
);
};
Whereas the corresponding API in CakePHP looks like this:
function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
$this->Auth->allow(array('login'));
}
public function login() {
$this->response->header(array(
'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' => '*',
'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' => 'Content-Type'
)
);
$this->autoRender = false;
}
What happens next is that the preflight OPTIONS request ist done - which looks quite good to me:
Request Headers:
OPTIONS /api_mobile_user/login HTTP/1.1
Host: aeap.localhost
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Origin: http://asf.localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53
Access-Control-Request-Headers: accept, content-type
Accept: */*
Referer: http://asf.localhost/?username_input=hjk&password_input=hjgk&login_button=
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: de-DE,de;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Response headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 15:29:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.10 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.1i PHP/5.5.15
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.15
Set-Cookie: CAKEPHP=j6st0hnq8ear2cc6psg56d6eu3; expires=Wed, 05-Nov-2014 19:29:00 GMT; Max-Age=14400; path=/; HttpOnly
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
But when the actual POST-request is done I get an status code 403:
XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://aeap.localhost/api_mobile_user/login. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://asf.localhost' is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 403.
How can I avoid this? In my opinion I already enabled CORS support for Cake ['Access-Control-Allow-Origin']. It seems to me that AngularJS posts some additional informations whioch are not checked during the preflight and then rejected by the backend.
Used versions: CakePHP 2.5.3, AngularJS: 1.3.0

Answer 1

Thanks to Marvin Smit I was able to determine the reason for the behavior which was not connected to CORS are the headers. I set 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' => '*'on web-server level so I was able to get a response which pointed to the security component of CakePHP.
I basically tried to send a POST-Reuqest to an API which did not expect that data should be posted to it. Therefore the access was denied. So I had to add $this->Security->csrfCheck = false to the beforeFilter:
function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
$this->Auth->allow(array('login'));
$this->Security->csrfCheck = false;
}

Answer 2

For what it's worth, the proper way to do this for Cakephp 3 is as follows
public function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
$this->Auth->allow(array('login'));
$this->eventManager()->off($this->Csrf);
}
Although, this is not recommended for AJAX requests. The following doc can help you more. CSRF And AJAX