libsoup Client Basics
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LIBSOUP Library

# libsoup Client Basics

Client-side tutorial

This section explains how to use libsoup as an HTTP client using several new APIs introduced in version 2.42. If you want to be compatible with older versions of libsoup, consult the documentation for that version.

## Creating a SoupSession

The first step in using the client API is to create a SoupSession. The session object encapsulates all of the state that libsoup is keeping on behalf of your program; cached HTTP connections, authentication information, etc.

When you create the session with `soup_session_new_with_options`, you can specify various additional options:

`"max-conns"`

  Allows you to set the maximum total number of connections the session will have open at one time. (Once it reaches this limit, it will either close idle connections, or wait for existing connections to free up before starting new requests.) The default value is 10.

`"max-conns-per-host"`

  Allows you to set the maximum total number of connections the session will have open to a single host at one time. The default value is 2.

`"user-agent"`

  Allows you to set a User-Agent string that will be sent on all outgoing requests.

`"accept-language"` and `"accept-language-auto"`

  Allow you to set an Accept-Language header on all outgoing requests. `"accept-language"` takes a list of language tags to use, while `"accept-language-auto"` automatically generates the list from the user's locale settings.

`"proxy-resolver"`

  `"proxy-resolver"` specifies a GProxyResolver to use to determine the HTTP proxies to use. By default, this is set to the resolver returned by `g_proxy_resolver_get_default`, so you do not need to set it yourself.

`"add-feature"` and `"add-feature-by-type"`

  These allow you to specify SoupSessionFeatures (discussed below) to add at construct-time.

Other properties are also available; see the SoupSession documentation for more details.

If you don't need to specify any options, you can just use `soup_session_new`, which takes no arguments.

## Session features

Additional session functionality is provided as SoupSessionFeatures, which can be added to a session, via the `"add-feature"` and `"add-feature-by-type"` options at session-construction-time, or afterward via the `soup_session_add_feature` and `soup_session_add_feature_by_type` functions.

A SoupContentDecoder is added for you automatically. This advertises to servers that the client supports compression, and automatically decompresses compressed responses.

Some other available features that you can add include:

SoupLogger

  A debugging aid, which logs all of libsoup's HTTP traffic to `stdout` (or another place you specify).

SoupCookieJar, SoupCookieJarText, and SoupCookieJarDB

  Support for HTTP cookies. SoupCookieJar provides non-persistent cookie storage, while SoupCookieJarText uses a text file to keep track of cookies between sessions, and SoupCookieJarDB uses a SQLite database.

SoupContentSniffer

  Uses the HTML5 sniffing rules to attempt to determine the Content-Type of a response when the server does not identify the Content-Type, or appears to have provided an incorrect one.

Use the "add_feature_by_type" property/function to add features that don't require any configuration (such as SoupContentSniffer), and the "add_feature" property/function to add features that must be constructed first (such as SoupLogger). For example, an application might do something like the following:

    	session = soup_session_new_with_options (
    		"add-feature-by-type", SOUP_TYPE_CONTENT_SNIFFER,
    		NULL);

    	if (debug_level) {
    		SoupLogger *logger;

    		logger = soup_logger_new (debug_level, -1);
    		soup_session_add_feature (session, SOUP_SESSION_FEATURE (logger));
    		g_object_unref (logger);
    	}

## Creating and Sending SoupMessages

Once you have a session, you send HTTP requests using SoupMessage. In the simplest case, you only need to create the message and it's ready to send:

    	SoupMessage *msg;

    	msg = soup_message_new ("GET", "http://example.com/");

In more complicated cases, you can use various SoupMessage, SoupMessageHeaders, and SoupMessageBody methods to set the request headers and body of the message:

    	SoupMessage *msg;

    	msg = soup_message_new ("POST", "http://example.com/form.cgi");
    	soup_message_set_request (msg, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
    	                          SOUP_MEMORY_COPY, formdata, strlen (formdata));
    	soup_message_headers_append (msg->request_headers, "Referer", referring_url);

(Although this is a bad example, because libsoup actually has convenience methods for dealing with HTML forms.)

You can also use `soup_message_set_flags` to change some default behaviors. For example, by default, SoupSession automatically handles responses from the server that redirect to another URL. If you would like to handle these yourself, you can set the `SOUP_MESSAGE_NO_REDIRECT` flag.

### Sending a Message Synchronously

To send a message and wait for the response, use `soup_session_send`:

    	GInputStream *stream;
    	GError *error = NULL;

    	stream = soup_session_send (session, msg, cancellable, &error);

At the point when `soup_session_send` returns, the request will have been sent, and the response headers read back in; you can examine the message's status_code, reason_phrase, and response_headers fields to see the response metadata. To get the response body, read from the returned GInputStream, and close it when you are done.

Note that `soup_session_send` only returns an error if a transport-level problem occurs (eg, it could not connect to the host, or the request was cancelled). Use the message's status_code field to determine whether the request was successful or not at the HTTP level (ie, "`200 OK`" vs "`401 Bad Request`").

If you would prefer to have libsoup gather the response body for you and then return it all at once, you can use the older `soup_session_send_message` API:

    	guint status;

    	status = soup_session_send_message (session, msg);

In this case, the response body will be available in the message's response_body field, and transport-level errors will be indicated in the status_code field via special pseudo-HTTP-status codes like `SOUP_STATUS_CANT_CONNECT`.

### Sending a Message Asynchronously

To send a message asynchronously, use `soup_session_send_async`:

    {
    	...
    	soup_session_send_async (session, msg, cancellable, my_callback, my_callback_data);
    	...
    }

    static void
    my_callback (GObject *object, GAsyncResult *result, gpointer user_data)
    {
    	GInputStream *stream;
    	GError *error = NULL;

    	stream = soup_session_send_finish (SOUP_SESSION (object), result, &error);
    	...
    }

The message will be added to the session's queue, and eventually (when control is returned back to the main loop), it will be sent and the response will be read. When the message has been sent, and its headers received, the callback will be invoked, in the standard GAsyncReadyCallback style.

As with synchronous sending, there is also an alternate API, `soup_session_queue_message`, in which your callback is not invoked until the response has been completely read:

    {
    	...
    	soup_session_queue_message (session, msg, my_callback, my_callback_data);
    	...
    }

    static void
    my_callback (SoupSession *session, SoupMessage *msg, gpointer user_data)
    {
    	/* msg->response_body contains the response */
    }

`soup_session_queue_message` is slightly unusual in that it steals a reference to the message object, and unrefs it after the last callback is invoked on it. So when using this API, you should not unref the message yourself.

## Processing the Response

Once you have received the initial response from the server, synchronously or asynchronously, streaming or not, you can look at the response fields in the `SoupMessage` to decide what to do next. The status_code and reason_phrase fields contain the numeric status and textual status response from the server. response_headers contains the response headers, which you can investigate using `soup_message_headers_get_list` and `soup_message_headers_foreach`.

SoupMessageHeaders automatically parses several important headers in response_headers for you and provides specialized accessors for them. Eg, `soup_message_headers_get_content_type`. There are several generic methods such as `soup_header_parse_param_list` (for parsing an attribute-list-type header) and `soup_header_contains` (for quickly testing if a list-type header contains a particular token). These handle the various syntactical oddities of parsing HTTP headers much better than functions like `g_strsplit` or `strstr`.

## Handling Authentication

SoupSession handles most of the details of HTTP authentication for you. If it receives a 401 ("Unauthorized") or 407 ("Proxy Authentication Required") response, the session will emit the authenticate signal, providing you with a SoupAuth object indicating the authentication type ("Basic", "Digest", or "NTLM") and the realm name provided by the server. If you have a username and password available (or can generate one), call `soup_auth_authenticate` to give the information to libsoup. The session will automatically requeue the message and try it again with that authentication information. (If you don't call `soup_auth_authenticate`, the session will just return the message to the application with its 401 or 407 status.)

If the server doesn't accept the username and password provided, the session will emit authenticate again, with the `retrying` parameter set to `TRUE`. This lets the application know that the information it provided earlier was incorrect, and gives it a chance to try again. If this username/password pair also doesn't work, the session will contine to emit `authenticate` again and again until the provided username/password successfully authenticates, or until the signal handler fails to call `soup_auth_authenticate`, at which point libsoup will allow the message to fail (with status 401 or 407).

If you need to handle authentication asynchronously (eg, to pop up a password dialog without recursively entering the main loop), you can do that as well. Just call `soup_session_pause_message` on the message before returning from the signal handler, and `g_object_ref` the SoupAuth. Then, later on, after calling `soup_auth_authenticate` (or deciding not to), call `soup_session_unpause_message` to resume the paused message.

By default, NTLM authentication is not enabled. To add NTLM support to a session, call:

    	soup_session_add_feature_by_type (session, SOUP_TYPE_AUTH_NTLM);

(You can also disable Basic or Digest authentication by calling `soup_session_remove_feature_by_type` on `SOUP_TYPE_AUTH_BASIC` or `SOUP_TYPE_AUTH_DIGEST`.)

## Multi-threaded usage

A SoupSession can be used from multiple threads. However, if you are using the async APIs, then each thread you use the session from must have its own thread-default GMainContext.

SoupMessage is not thread-safe, so once you send a message on the session, you must not interact with it from any thread other than the one where it was sent.

## Sample Programs

A few sample programs are available in the libsoup sources, in the `examples` directory:

- `get` is a simple command-line HTTP GET utility using the asynchronous API.

- `simple-proxy` uses both the client and server APIs to create a simple (and not very RFC-compliant) proxy server.

More complicated examples are available in GNOME git.