[dna-issues] [JBoss JIRA] Commented: (DNA-513) REST server does not correctly encode binary values

[Randall Hauch (JIRA)]

    [ https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-513?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12484825#action_12484825 ] 

Randall Hauch commented on DNA-513:
-----------------------------------

I talked with Brian about this, and perhaps the most challenging aspect of this is knowing which properties (if any) are encoded in a client PUT/POST request.  Either every property value has to be looked at as possibly being encoded, or there has to be some annotation in the request defining whether a property value is encoded.  The former is expensive and potentially error prone (e.g., if a string property value is stored already encoded in the repository, or if a string property coincidentally matches an encoded representation).  The latter approach is less attractive, but is really the only surefire way for the client and server to know which properties have been encoded in the request and must be decoded prior to use.

There seem to be two options for annotating the properties: include the annotation in the name or in the value.  Annotating the name is quite straightforward as long as the annotation includes characters that are not normally allowed in a property name (so we always know that the annotation is what it is, and not coincidentally part of the property name).  Annotating the value appears on the surface to be pretty easy, but multi-valued properties and the wider range of values allowed make it more challenging and potentially more risky.

Therefore, the approach we're going to take is to annotation the property name to specify that the property value(s) has been encoded.  The format will be "{propertyName}/{encoding}/", where "{propertyName}" is the usual name of the property, and "{encoding}" is the lowercase name of the encoding that is used.  For example, a "jcr:data" property encoded in Base64 would be represented in the JSON representations as "jcr:data/base64/".  According to the JCR 2.0 PFD Section 3.2.2, the local name (which applies to property names) can only contain valid XmlChar except '/' | ':' | '[' | ']' | '|' | '*' (where the JCR 1.0 spec is a bit more lenient, and it basically says that a name is not valid if it begins or ends with a '/', ':', '[', ']', '*', ''', '"', '|' or any whitespace character).  Therefore the {propertyName}/{encoding}/" format is never a valid property name, so can always be used to determine the encoding.

> REST server does not correctly encode binary values
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: DNA-513
>                 URL: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-513
>             Project: DNA
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Web Application
>    Affects Versions: 0.5
>            Reporter: Randall Hauch
>            Assignee: Brian Carothers
>            Priority: Blocker
>             Fix For: 0.6
>
>         Attachments: dna-513.1.patch
>
>
> The REST server (or rather web application) does not properly encode binary values in the JSON results, and instead is embedding the toString() version of the byte[].  The binary values should instead be encoded in Base64, and the REST client should be able to then read (or upload) binary values using this approach.
> (If the binary value is already a Base64-encoded representation, then the JSON content will just be a Base64-encoded representation of the value that happens to be Base64-encoded. Shouldn't be a problem.)

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