Comments on: Handling Permissions for AJAX Requests

By: Matze

Matze — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:57:36 +0000

Thanks a lot, exactly what I need

By: Ted McFadden

Ted McFadden — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:01:43 +0000

Follow up on the browser popping up the authentication dialog:

The browser will only pop up the dialog if it understands the
WWW-authenticate header that is returned from the server (usually BASIC or DIGEST). If this is the case, the javascript never sees the 401 from an ajax call.

If WWW-Authenticate defines another scheme, (or is missing?) the 401 will be passed back up to the javascript and you can handle it in code yourself.

By: aaron

aaron — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:39:54 +0000

That’s how a browser handles a 401 response for the user. In this case I am handling a 401 for an asynchronous call made by the script itself.

I guess the way I would think about it is that if I request a page that I am not authorised for the http response status code is 401. Upon receiving this the browser prompts me for a username and password. However if the script requests a page that the user isn’t authorised to access then the response code is 401 and it’s up to the script to handle it. Providing a username and password dialog box to a script isn’t too useful :)

I hope this helps.

By: blinds

blinds — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:29:39 +0000

How do you manage not to get the “enter your password”-dialog every browser shows on a 401 error?