Wolfmans Howlings

metaWeblog api in typo fails on some posts

Posted by Jim Morris on Sat Jun 03 23:32:02 -0700 2006

I was using a ruby script to post my blogs from the command line, and it used the xmlrpc/client which would occasionally fail with this error...

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:546:in `do_rpc': HTTP-Error: 500 Internal Server Error  (RuntimeError)
    from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:420:in `call2'
    from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:410:in `call'
    from send2blog.rb:103

This was annoying, so I did some sleuthing and it turns out there were various apparently unrelated bugs posted about this in the typo trac, and in rails. I noticed it seemed to be fixed in Rails edge so I found the patch and applied it locally to my typo's version of rails, and now I can post all my blogs from the command line again.

The problem was with posts containing && or << etc which seeing as I was posting a lot of ruby code most of my blogs had.

• The relevant Typo ticket is #538
• The relevant rails ticket is #4955

The fix is a one line addition to vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb on line 48 the patch is...

Index: actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb
===================================================================
--- actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb     (revision 4324)
+++ actionpack/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/cgi_methods.rb     (working copy)
@@ -45,6 +45,7 @@
       parsed_params = {}

       for key, value in params
+        next if key.nil?
     value = [value] if key =~ /.*\[\]$/
     unless key.include?('[')
       # much faster to test for the most common case first (GET)

This seems to work for rails versions >= 1.0, although it is already patched in edge rails.