AFNetworking version 2 content-type error

Question

I'm attempting to make an iphone app that will interact with a particular JIRA server. I've got the following code to log in:

NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@"https://mycompany.atlassian.net/rest/auth/latest/session/"];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
NSString *postString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"{\"username\":\"%@\",\"password\":\"%@\"}", username, password];
[request setHTTPBody:[postString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation = [[AFHTTPRequestOperation alloc] initWithRequest:request];
[request setValue:@"application/json" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Accept" ];
operation.responseSerializer = [AFJSONResponseSerializer serializer];
[operation setCompletionBlockWithSuccess:
    ^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, id responseObject) {
        NSLog(@"JSON: %@", responseObject);
    } failure:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, NSError *error) {
    NSLog(@"ERROR: %@", error);

    }
 ];
 [operation start];

But it's giving me the following error having to do with Content-Type:

ERROR: Error Domain=AFNetworkingErrorDomain Code=-1011
"Request failed: unsupported media type (415)"
UserInfo=0x8cd6540
{
  NSErrorFailingURLKey=https://mycompany.atlassian.net/rest/auth/latest/session/,
  NSLocalizedDescription=Request failed: unsupported media type (415),
  NSUnderlyingError=0x8c72e70
  "Request failed: unacceptable content-type: text/html", 

I'm not sure what the problem is. I found this question, which I thought might be a similar problem, but the answers say to either use the AFJSONRequestOperation class (which I can't because I'm using AFNetworking version 2, which doesn't have that class), or to fix it on the server side (which I also can't for obvious reasons).

What can I fix this error when I can't fix the server side and I can't use AFJSONRequestOperation?

Answer 1

If using AFNetworking 2.0, you can use the POST method, which simplifies this a bit:

AFHTTPRequestOperationManager *manager = [AFHTTPRequestOperationManager manager];
manager.requestSerializer = [AFJSONRequestSerializer serializer];
NSDictionary *parameters = @{@"username":username, @"password":password};
[manager POST:@"https://mycompany.atlassian.net/rest/auth/latest/session/" parameters:parameters success:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, id responseObject) {
    NSLog(@"JSON: %@", responseObject);
} failure:^(AFHTTPRequestOperation *operation, NSError *error) {
    NSLog(@"Error: %@", error);
}];

This does the creation of the request, setting its Content-Type according to the requestSerializer setting, and encodes the JSON for you. One of the advantages of AFNetworking is that you can get out of the weeds of constructing and configuring NSURLRequest objects manually.

---

By the way, the "Request failed: unacceptable content-type: text/html" error means that regardless of what you were expecting to receive (e.g. JSON), you received HTML response. This is very common: Many server errors (e.g. the server informing you that the request was malformed, etc.) generate HTML error messages. If you want to see that HTML, in your failure block, simply log the operation.responseString.