Why do some cross-domain JSON-requests fail but others don't?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4219881

Question

I have a little trouble understanding the security bit around JSON, because often things that in theory should not work, seemingly do. AFAIK, calls from a script on a page that resides on domain A, are not supposed to be able receive data from a domain B. But in the code below the calls to one external domain fail, whereas another goes through. And neither one are packed JSON calls (jsonp).

Why is this? Should not both be disallowed from getting through the browser security checks? I get the same results in Chrome and Firefox. If I host the below html-page on dropbox.com, Chrome gives me this error message:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://www.odinfond.no/rest/fund/calc/fundReturn?&id=300&oneTimeInvestment=100000&oneTimeInvestmentDate=2009-11-01&endDate=2010-11-01&currency=NOK. Origin http://dl.dropbox.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

The JSON response I would have gotten if the call went through can be seen by clicking this direct link. The call to the other service returns successfully. I host the below code on dropbox. Try it out here.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />

  <title>JSON/JSONP test</title>
  <script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 </head>

 <body>
  <script>
   service = 'http://www.odinfond.no/rest/fund/calc/fundReturn?'; 
   parameters = { 
     id: '300',
     oneTimeInvestment:'100000',
     oneTimeInvestmentDate:'2009-11-01',
     endDate:'2010-11-01',
     currency:'NOK'
    }
   $.getJSON( service, parameters, function(data) {
    alert("Success"); 
   });

   service = 'http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeLookupJSON?'
   parameters = {
    postalcode:1540,
    country:'NO'
   }
   $.getJSON(service, parameters, function(data) {
    alert(data.postalcodes[0].adminName2);
   });
  </script>
  <p>Use Firebug to see JSON response</p>
 </body>
</html>
Was it helpful?

Solution

You'll notice that the working request has a response header:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

This is what frees up the browser to make the response available to the script. (Note that the request is always made, the same origin policy only affects whether the response is accessible to the script or not)

If the '*' is a hostname, access is only allowed if the current document's hostname matches the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header

OTHER TIPS

Browsing the source code, it appears that $.ajax() detects remote URLs and replaces AJAX (XMLHttpRequest ) with good old script tags:

    // Build temporary JSONP function
    if ( s.dataType === "json" && (s.data && jsre.test(s.data) || jsre.test(s.url)) ) {
        jsonp = s.jsonpCallback || ("jsonp" + jsc++);

        // Replace the =? sequence both in the query string and the data
        if ( s.data ) {
            s.data = (s.data + "").replace(jsre, "=" + jsonp + "$1");
        }

        s.url = s.url.replace(jsre, "=" + jsonp + "$1");

        // We need to make sure
        // that a JSONP style response is executed properly
        s.dataType = "script";

        // Handle JSONP-style loading
        var customJsonp = window[ jsonp ];

        window[ jsonp ] = function( tmp ) {
            if ( jQuery.isFunction( customJsonp ) ) {
                customJsonp( tmp );

            } else {
                // Garbage collect
                window[ jsonp ] = undefined;

                try {
                    delete window[ jsonp ];
                } catch( jsonpError ) {}
            }

            data = tmp;
            jQuery.handleSuccess( s, xhr, status, data );
            jQuery.handleComplete( s, xhr, status, data );

            if ( head ) {
                head.removeChild( script );
            }
        };
    }

[...]

    // Matches an absolute URL, and saves the domain
    var parts = rurl.exec( s.url ),
        remote = parts && (parts[1] && parts[1].toLowerCase() !== location.protocol || parts[2].toLowerCase() !== location.host);

    // If we're requesting a remote document
    // and trying to load JSON or Script with a GET
    if ( s.dataType === "script" && type === "GET" && remote ) {
        var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0] || document.documentElement;
        var script = document.createElement("script");
        if ( s.scriptCharset ) {
            script.charset = s.scriptCharset;
        }
        script.src = s.url;

        // Handle Script loading
        if ( !jsonp ) {
            var done = false;

            // Attach handlers for all browsers
            script.onload = script.onreadystatechange = function() {
                if ( !done && (!this.readyState ||
                        this.readyState === "loaded" || this.readyState === "complete") ) {
                    done = true;
                    jQuery.handleSuccess( s, xhr, status, data );
                    jQuery.handleComplete( s, xhr, status, data );

                    // Handle memory leak in IE
                    script.onload = script.onreadystatechange = null;
                    if ( head && script.parentNode ) {
                        head.removeChild( script );
                    }
                }
            };
        }

        // Use insertBefore instead of appendChild  to circumvent an IE6 bug.
        // This arises when a base node is used (#2709 and #4378).
        head.insertBefore( script, head.firstChild );

        // We handle everything using the script element injection
        return undefined;
    }
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