Help with request

Scriptable
1

When I run the following in the app it works but from a widget gives a format error (it used to work). Any idea why?

const request = new Request(`http://ergast.com/api/f1/2023/drivers.json`);
  const response = await request.loadJSON();

console.log(response)
2

The reason is because the sever answers not with json but with this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Access Denied</title>
</head> <body>
<h1>Access Denied</h1>
<р></р>
<hr>
</body> </html>

IMG_7534
IMG_75341013×1057 73.7 KB

And opening the URL directly in Safari it says Format not found.

It seems that this is a sever side issue.

3

Opening the URL in Safari now seems to output JSON.

4

For me too, but only if I copy and paste it in Safari. If I use the Open Link from the context menu that opens when I select the URL then I get the Format not found. Quite strange :thinking:

5

Just checked the code above for good measure and that seems to run fine now too.

image
image1290×2472 337 KB

6

Yes, but in the widget on the home screen it doesn’t.

7

Got it. I agree that is strange. If I build out a full widget and preview a widget in the app, it gives the JSON. Displaying it in the widget on the home screen give the HTML you had (setting to load a string response instead of JSON).

Switching to HTTPS or other non-JSON output formats seems to yield similar results suggesting it is a broad block.

I wonder if there is something in the default header that Scriptable/iOS is sending for widgets that the API is actively blocking. Maybe a user agent string or something?

I do not see anything recent on the bug reports page about it, but that might be a good place to ask about what triggers an access denied page response on this otherwise open API.

8

Adding the mobile Safari user-agent seems to work.

const request = new Request(`https://ergast.com/api/f1/2023/drivers.json`);

request.headers = {
  "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.5 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"
}

const response = await request.loadJSON();
9

Thanks all for the quick help.

Seems the request.headers solution works.

I am not going to go too far down the rabbit hole with the API owners on this as it is being discontinued at end of the year anyway.

Thanks again.