Pubsubhubbub on Rails. How to extract the raw POST body contents from the POST request?

Question

I am having trouble setting up a pubsub enabled subscriber app using rails. I have currently subscribed to the open hub pubsubhubbub.appspot.com and am receiving pings to my application's endpoint. (as of now i have created a counter which increments everytime the end point is pinged). But i am not able to understand as to how to extract the raw POST body contents from the POST. I am new to pubsub and am eager to experiment with it. I came across this blog post but it is not language specific.

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Source: Joseph Smarr: Implementing PubSubHubbub subscriber support: A step-by-step guide. http://josephsmarr.com/2010/03/01/implementing-pubsubhubbub-subscriber-support-a-step-by-step-guide/

Now you’re ready for the pay-out–magically receiving pings from the ether every time the blog you’ve subscribed to has new content! You’ll receive inbound requests to your specified callback URL without any additional query parameters added (i.e. you’ll know it’s a ping and not a verification because there won’t be any hub.mode parameter included). Instead, the new entries of the subscribed feed will be included directly in the POST body of the request, with a request Content-Type of application/atom+xml for ATOM feeds and application/rss+xml for RSS feeds. Depending on your programming language of choice, you’ll need to figure out how to extract the raw POST body contents. For instance, in PHP you would fopen the special filename php://input to read it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You didn't say but I'm assuming you are running Rails 3.x?

To get the raw POST body you simply use request.raw_post in your controller. This will give you a long string that looks like a request parameters string: some_var=something&something_else=something_else... which you can then parse to get at what you want.

However, look at you development logs for an incoming request and see if the params hash isn't a better option for you. The service should post the data under some variable name, such as some_var above, and the params hash will hold an params[:some_var] containing only that data. No need for you to dig it out on your own in other words.