geneQuery POST uses invalid Content-Type form-urlencoded

[jvwong]

Environment info

• Browser version (client) : n/a
• Node.js version (server) : 8

Current (buggy) behaviour

In several instances, the search infobox code calls geneQuery using POST with Content-Type (application/x-www-form-urlencoded).

/src/client/services/server-api/index.js

  geneQuery(query){
    query.genes=_.concat(['padding'],query.genes.split(' '));
    return fetch('/api/validation', {
      method:'POST', 
      headers: {
        'Accept': 'application/json',
        'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
      },
      body:qs.stringify(query)
    }).then(res => res.json()).then(ids=> _.assign(ids,{unrecognized:_.tail(ids.unrecognized)}));//remove padding
  },

Why this still works is not completely clear to me but it is accepted by the service if I add a gene value padding:

Desired behaviour

POST data with Content-Type application/json

[q4wen]

Not sure I change correctly.

There is 400 bad request error when I change the content type to application/json

And here is the related back-end code:

I tried adding res.setHeader('content-type', 'application/json'), but still have the same error.

[jvwong]

Service would be expecting JSON with your change - but sending some string?

geneQuery(query){
...
      body:qs.stringify(query)
   ...

[maxkfranz]

The body is usually either FormData or stringified JSON. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29775797/fetch-post-json-data

[maxkfranz]

UVString case: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowOrWorkerGlobalScope/fetch

[jvwong]

One more thing.

There is some code in the same function where a padding string is concatenated to query.genes before split:

const ServerAPI = {
  ...
geneQuery(query){
    query.genes=_.concat(['padding'],query.genes.split(' '));
    ...
  },
  ...
}

Maybe this was some hack required to POST as form-url-encoded to our JSON validator endpoint? This should probably be:

const ServerAPI = {
  ...
geneQuery(query){
    query.genes = query.genes.split(' ');
    ...
  },
  ...
}