Web Api 2 Preflight CORS request for Bearer Token

Question

I have a web-app with an AngularJS front-end and a Web Api 2 back-end, and it uses bearer-tokens for authentication.

All is well in FireFox & IE, but with Chrome, my initial login request is SOMETIMES pre-flighted.

Here's the call from the AngularJS service:

$http.post(http://localhost:55483/token, data, { headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' } }).success(function (response) { ... });

The preflight request gets kicked back with an "Allow-Access-Control-Origin" error.

However, if I click the Login button again (thereby re-sending the above request) all is well.

Any idea on how to prevent/trap/handle this?

PS: I use the LOC

context.OwinContext.Response.Headers.Add("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", new[] { "*" });

in the ApplicationOAuthProvider.cs file to put the CORS allow-header on the /Token request, which works fine in IE, FireFox and sometimes in Chrome.

Answer 1

The below is Fancy comment:

Figured this out with help from post by LeftyX on Jun 29:
- Move this LOC app.UseCors(Microsoft.Owin.Cors.CorsOptions.AllowAll); to the FIRST LINE in the ConfigureAuth method of Startup.Auth.cs.
- Then, REMOVE this LOC context.OwinContext.Response.Headers.Add("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", new[] { "*" }); from the GrantResourceOwnerCredentials() method of ApplicationOAuthProvide.cs.

Preflight CORS-request them gets handled properly, and then the actual requet goes through

Thank man, you save my whole day.
Cause it happens for many guys, I bring your comment to answer box for other guys can see it.

I don't want to get vote up for this. Please comment on my answer instead

Thank you

Answer 2

I hope this is able to help somebody out there. For me:

• adding the app.useCors(); LOC did not work.
• Adding the app.useCors(); LOC worked for other people on my team.

So I needed a solution that would work across everyone's environments.

Ultimately what I ended up doing was adding the header and value right into the Web.config with the following (where localhost:9000 is my node application that is serving up angular):

<system.webServer>
    <httpProtocol>
      <customHeaders>
        <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="http://localhost:9000" />
        <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type"/>
      </customHeaders>
    </httpProtocol>
  </system.webServer>

Then in production you can just change the origin value to the production front-end url.

If you want CORS enabled for all origins, change the value to "*".