Why is Common Lisp famous library Dexador not working for this HTTP POST request case? Is it a bug or did I miss something?

Question

I am using SBCL, Emacs, Slime, and Dexador. I am also watching this course on Udemy about Postman.

At some point, the instructor presents a POST request that uses basic authentication. It is summarized by the following picture:

The POST request is made at the address https://simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me/api-clients. In addition, a message as the body in JSON format is submitted:

{
    "clientName": "Postman",
    "clientEmail": "[email protected]"
}

As a reply, the server responds with:

{
    "accessToken": "079e7bb6d3832c0d7054ae0e1146d6ed3277836fefd2e0aa9e5d7d207945e17f"
}

I tried doing the same using the famous library called Dexador and using the documentation instructions:

CL-USER>(dex:post "https://simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me/api-clients"
            :content '(("clientName" . "Postman") ("clientEmail" . "[email protected]")))

Unfortunately, Slime returns an error message indicating a 400 bad request:

An HTTP request to "https://simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me/api-clients" returned 400 bad request.

{"error":"Invalid or missing client name."}

Is this a bug? Did I miss something?

Answer 1

A working example:

(dex:request "https://simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me/api-clients"
                      :method :post 
                      :headers '(("Content-Type" . "application/json"))
                      :content "{\"clientName\":\"Postman\",
                        \"clientEmail\": \"[email protected]\"}" 
                      :verbose t)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
POST /api-clients HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Dexador/0.9.15 (SBCL 1.4.5.debian); Linux; 5.0.0-31-generic
Host: simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me
Accept: */*
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 83

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:44:55 GMT
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 82
Connection: keep-alive
x-powered-by: Express
etag: W/"52-egRRCktqEOIEh9dS2uY8rWUiyfY"

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
"{\"accessToken\":\"7e559ebee8ff889054346dbbd727c1bb9b9d55123fb5bd49686337e8829f8b78\"}"
201
#<HASH-TABLE :TEST EQUAL :COUNT 6 {1003C05373}>
#<QURI.URI.HTTP:URI-HTTPS https://simple-tool-rental-api.glitch.me/api-clients>
#<CL+SSL::SSL-STREAM for #<FD-STREAM for "socket 192.168.1.53:39148, peer: 18.205.205.44:443" {10035F4C33}>>

I use the "pete" email because the pedro one is "already registered". I use hand-formatted JSON to send the credentials with a Content-Type of application/json, which format I am sure about. I wanted to use a "raw" content-type as in the Postman screen capture, but wasn't sure the alist played nice with it.

I think by knowing better the example API you could sort out another content-type to use with the alist body content.