Rails does not recognize the "text/*" MIME type

[lighthouse-import]

Imported from Lighthouse. Original ticket at: http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/6458
Created by Roel van der Hoorn - 2011-02-21 10:36:42 UTC

Some web crawlers use the "text/*" MIME type in the HTTP ACCEPT header in their request. This makes Rails throw a MissingTemplate error.

This ticket covers only the part that "text/*" should return any text type (e.g. text/html, text/plain). And "image/*" any image type for that matter.

Note that this issue is not the same as #5113, which covers the MissingTemplate part, instead of returning a 406 (Not Acceptable), if the HTTP ACCEPT header requests only MIME types for which the respond_to block does not have an adequate response.

[lighthouse-import]

Imported from Lighthouse.
Comment by Anton Astashov - 2011-03-03 04:59:52 UTC

Agreed, e.g. Bing Bot uses Accept: text/*, and every its request raises ActionView::MissingTemplate exception in our app.

[lighthouse-import]

Imported from Lighthouse.
Comment by Diego Carrion - 2011-03-05 23:10:30 UTC

This seems to be fixed on edge.

[hlxwell]

The recent version happened again. 3.2 beta

could you show me the fixing code?

[scottwb]

@hlxwell - I see the fixing commits here ranging from Nov 22, 2010 to Nov 28, 2010: https://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb, notably:

• 6f6e754
• 18adbe9

For anyone else using an earlier version of Rails that wants this fixed, but can't upgrade just yet, I have posted a monkey-patch with some test cases that you can use to work around this:

https://gist.github.com/1754727

[hlxwell]

One question is:

@synonyms of Mime::ALL is blank, still works?

ree-1.8.7-2011.03 :001 > Mime::ALL
=> #<Mime::Type:0x106424710 @synonyms=[], @symbol=:all, @string="/">
ree-1.8.7-2011.03 :002 > Mime::HTML
=> #<Mime::Type:0x1064267e0 @synonyms=["application/xhtml+xml"], @symbol=:html, @string="text/html">

if Rails.version == "3.0.7"

I am using 3.0.11 still has this error. maybe below 3.1?

[scottwb]

It looks like your pasted code omitted the #<Mime::Type...> stuff. Can you try pasting it in a code block or using a gist? I am curious to see what you have. Here is what mine looks like:

1.8.7 :001 > Mime::ALL
 => #<Mime::Type:0x102736970 @string="*/*", @synonyms=[], @symbol=:all> 
1.8.7 :002 > Mime::HTML
 => #<Mime::Type:0x10273ab88 @string="text/html", @synonyms=["application/xhtml+xml"], @symbol=:html>

I don't think this patch changes that behavior.