Showing posts with label CORS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CORS. Show all posts

Friday 9 February 2018

CORS for SharePoint Requests

Problem:  I wish to create a standard header for my client to layover multiple applications to tie together branding and global organisation branding.  Similar to what O365 does as shown below:
Provide a common header that logs the user in and dynamically generates the header within SharePoint.  Use an HTTP Javascript request from multiple children applications to deliver the shared user common header.  As I have numerous application on sub-domains (e.g. https://hr.contoso.com https://cash.finance.contoso.com and even https://clients.oldurl.net) so I need to ensure I allow CORS requests that also allow for user authentication.  

"The CORS mechanism supports secure cross-domain requests and data transfers between browsers and web servers."  Mozilla

Initial Hypothesis:

Option 1 - IIS and SharePoint struggle to handle this requirement using configuration.  For instance, by default, only same origin subdomain requests are allowed.  Adding the header Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * allows for any domain but I can't specify to use credentials so I need an anonymous site, and then I lose my ability to identify my user and generate a dynamic menu.
Result: Fail.  I receive the following error in the browser: "A wildcard '*' cannot be used in the 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header when the credentials flag is true"

Option 2- Specify a multiple sub-domains, i.e. Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://hr.contoso.com,other.contoso.com
To do authentication, I now need the following 3 HTTP response headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://hr.contoso.com, https://other.contoso.com
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Vary: Origin
Result: Fail.  I receive the following error in the browser: "The 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header contains multiple values '', but only one is allowed".

Option 3 - Specify a single sub-domains, i.e. Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://hr.contoso.com
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://hr.contoso.com
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Vary: Origin
Result: Fail.  Works for the hr sub-domain but my other sub-domains fail. I have multiple sub-domains that need access.

Key take away: There can only be 1 Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header, and the returned Access-Control-Allow-Origin header can only have one URL.

Option 4 - Dynamically inject the Access-Control-Allow-Origin, in SharePoint, this is an ISAPI filter, or I need to use the Global.asax to dynamically set the HTTP Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to a white-list list of URLs.  Beware of caching pages downstream.  Alternatively, URL Rewrite can be used on the IIS WFE's.

Thanks to Abhishek Sharma for highlighting my lack of knowledge about CORS requests.