You can use HTTP Basic Authentication with Javascript/Ajax in just three steps. I’ll give you them in just a moment.
The Background
This morning, I was experimenting with Adobe AIR, writing a client to tell me whether I have games waiting for me to make a move on Weewar, and I needed to be able to use my username and “token” via Basic Auth to do that. It was not easy to find how to do it. In fact, I had to connect a few dots to get it to work. Here you go:
Step 1
First, get Base64.js from Webtoolkit, and load it on your page. We need the encode routine from that library.
Step 2
Construct your Authorization header like so:
function make_base_auth(user, password) {
var tok = user + ':' + pass;
var hash = Base64.encode(tok);
return "Basic " + hash;
}
Step 3
Use it in your Ajax call.
var auth = make_basic_auth('me','mypassword');
var url = 'http://example.com';
// RAW
xml = new XMLHttpRequest();
xml.setRequestHeader('Authorization', auth);
xml.open('GET',url)
// ExtJS
Ext.Ajax.request({
url : url,
method : 'GET',
headers : { Authorization : auth }
});
// jQuery
$.ajax({
url : url,
method : 'GET',
beforeSend : function(req) {
req.setRequestHeader('Authorization', auth);
}
});
