getting 403 errors in response body, but the action requested was performed

[WillB120]

I mean, I'm thankful and all that the API call is working, but if I'm getting a spurious error message how am I to know how to handle the response programatically?

Currently I'm doing this all in the name of testing.  I started off using the IO/docs interface and all was well.  Once I started integrating the same calls into my development site, I started seeing error responses like so:

 { ["headers"]=> array(7) { ["content-type"]=> string(16) "application/json" ["date"]=> string(29) "Sat, 05 Oct 2013 14:46:29 GMT" ["server"]=> string(13) "Mashery Proxy" ["x-mashery-error-code"]=> string(26) "ERR_403_DEVELOPER_INACTIVE" ["x-mashery-responder"]=> string(39) "prod-j-worker-us-east-1d-35.mashery.com" ["content-length"]=> string(3) "168" ["connection"]=> string(5) "Close" } ["body"]=> string(168) "[{ "error_key":"mashery.not.authorized.inactive", "error_message":"The Mashery account associated with this request is not active, or an invalid API key was used." }]" ["response"]=> array(2) { ["code"]=> int(403) ["message"]=> string(9) "Forbidden" } ["cookies"]=> array(0) { } ["filename"]=> NULL }

Well, ok, so I've requested to send out a lot of emails so maybe my API access has been suspended...Mashery account is still valid, constant contact account is still valid and making the calls still works on the IO/docs interface.

Then I looked at my campaigns in constant contact and lo and behold - they were there.  So the request worked but the error was erroneous.  What gives?

[WillB120]

Um...seriously...anybody?  Help please.

[DaveBerard]

Can you provide the code you're using and PM us or email us your API key you're using in the request?  We would need more information to dig into this.  The error message shown indicates that the request had an invalid API key and wasn't actually processed by our servers, it was caught and blocked by our API management proxy (hosted by Mashery).  Either you're sending multiple requests, one that doesn't have all the valid information you need, and the valid request is being processed correctly or something very unexpected is going on.  Either way, we'd need a code sample and your developer information.

[WillB120]

Thanks

[DaveBerard]

Thanks.  Sent this over to the API support staff to take a look at.  We don't have much expertise with that Wordpress module in house, we generally recommend using our PHP wrapper library for PHP development as it eliminates any 3rd party issues and can be fully supported.  Team is going to see if they can trouble shoot this though. 

[WillB120 · Accepted solution]

The API support team got me sorted on this.  Thanks!

in case anyone else is experiencing this problem, here's what was going on.  I was using the WordPress wp_http class to create my API call.  Here's a copy 'n paste of the relevant information from the email I got:

In this case it ended up being the HTTP request function in WordPress following a location header that is returned in order to provide the URI for a campaign when it is created.

In order to fix this, a parameter simply needs to be added to the request for 'redirection' => 0. Here’s the difference in the code:

Before:

$result = $request->request( $url, array( 'method' => 'POST', 'headers' => $headers, 'body' => $body) );

After

$result = $request->request( $url, array( 'method' => 'POST', 'headers' => $headers, 'body' => $body, 'redirection' => 0) );