Re: [xslt] Authentication support

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 05:11:16PM -0400, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
>    I  need  to  write  an  XSLT  stylesheet  that  that  downloads a page
>    protected by HTTP authentication; i.e. I need to supply a username and
>    password. I tried using a URL like
>    [1]https://user:pass host/file.xml 
>    but I got the message
>    unable to parse [2]https://user:pass host/file.xml
>    I can always set up a cron job to download the file with curl and then
>    hit  it  with xsltproc, but is there a simpler way? Is there any means
>    of providing xsltproc with a username and password to be used for HTTP
>    authentication?

  Hi Eliotte,

 well, the http supoort in xsltproc comes from libxml2 nanohttp module.
the goal there was to be able to fetch resources referenced from XML documents
like the external subset, or external entities and in general a very basic
support is sufficient (DTD fetching ususlly don't require authentication).
One of the design goal is to keep the HTTP and FTP implementations of libxml2
rather minimal, but allow to override them if the application needs more
functionalities (like authentication or https encryption), and in general
people just use libcurl for this. xmllint and xsltproc just inherit those
layers but don't link to libcurl for advanced support (this could be done
but from a packaging/dependancy point of view could get quickly annoying).

  I guess fetching separately is currently the only option, but I wanted
to give a bit of background to explain why it is that way.

Daniel

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