HTTPProxy - authenticated proxy servers supported?

[Dave Cragg]

At 1:29 pm +1200 21/8/03, Rodney Tamblyn wrote:
>It appears that authenticated proxy servers are not supported in
>Metacard/Revolution.  Please tell me I am wrong.

You're kind of wrong. :)

If you know in advance that proxy authentication is required, you 
need to set the httpHeaders appropriately. The header should look 
something like this:

    Proxy-Authorization: <stuff>

What you need to put in place of <stuff> depends on the 
authentication scheme being used. If it's the Basic authorization 
scheme, then the header will look like this:

    Proxy-Authorization: Basic <base64 encoded string>

where the base64-encoded string is a base64 encoding of the user ID, 
a colon, and the password. So:

put <ID> into tID
put <password> into tPass
put base64Encode(tID & ":" & tPass) into tString
set the httpHeaders to "Proxy-Authorization:" && tString

If another scheme is used (digest, kerberos, etc.) you have more work 
to do. (But I think someone once posted a way of handling Digest 
authorization on one of the Rev or MC lists. So a look through the 
archives might help.)

There is information on the Digest and Basic schemes here:

<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2617.html>

If you don't know in advance whether proxy-authenitication is 
required, you can find out by getting the result of an http url call. 
It should return "error 407 " followed by a text description. In that 
case, you'll then have to find a "Proxy-authenicate" field in the 
headers returned by the proxy server. You can get the headers by 
using the libUrlLastRhHeaders() function.

Cheers
Dave