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Dealing with Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery in Rails

Opening hyperlinks the ‘Microsoft Way’

When you embed a link in a Microsoft word document, Word will use “Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery” to determine if the document can be edited by Word (via DAV for example). This can result in some strange emails littering your inbox if you are running a Ruby on Rails based site with exception notifier.

For example:


A ActionController::NotImplemented occurred in application#index:

 Only  requests are allowed.
 [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/routing/route_set.rb:389:in `recognize_path'

-------------------------------
Environment:
-------------------------------

 * CONTENT_LENGTH         : 0
 * HTTP_CONTENT_LENGTH    : 0
 * HTTP_USER_AGENT        : Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery
 * HTTP_VERSION           : HTTP/1.1
 * REQUEST_METHOD         : OPTIONS
 * REQUEST_URI            : /static/

By default RoR routing will route GET, PUT, POST, DELETE and HEAD request methods, but Office is using OPTIONS, which is described in RFC 2616

I suppose that this is useful if you are running an intranet site, but in that case you’re likely using something like Sharepoint, not a custom RoR application. These requests can be served by setting up a catch all route that will intercept any OPTIONS requests, and then return an appropriate header. Since we don’t support any of the features that Office is looking for, a simple 200 status will suffice.

You can serve these requests from whichever controller you feel is appropriate. In my case I’ll use a controller called ‘index’

In config/routes.rb 

map.connect '*path', 
            :controller => 'index', 
            :action => 'options_for_mopd', 
            :conditions => {:method => :options}
In app/controllers/index_controller.rb 

  def options_for_mopd
    render :nothing => true, :status => 200
  end
Rails doesn’t support the OPTIONS HTTP verb, so we’ll have to monkey patch to add it. In lib/extra_http_verbs.rb 

module ActionController
  module Routing
    HTTP_METHODS = [:get, :head, :post, :put, :delete, :options]
  end
end

Make sure to require lib/extra_http_verbs.rb in an initializer.

Testing it is rather easy, even though RoR doesn’t have a function defined for OPTIONS like it does for GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and HEAD. In test/functional/index_controller_test.rb


  def test_options_for_mopd
    get :options_for_mopd, {}, :REQUEST_METHOD => 'OPTIONS'
    assert_response :success
  end

For more information about Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery, see this knowledge base article

Carsten
  • Authority 339
Post Body
Carsten said:

Cool Wes, I was getting sick of those exceptions!

  • Quote
  • Posted 4 months ago.
jwallace41
  • Authority 14
Post Body
jwallace41 said:

Two things. I think it should be ‘path’ instead of ‘path’ and to test that it actually works, you can use curl which is available on every platform pretty much for free.

Here’s the curl command: curl -X OPTIONS http://:/

  • Quote
  • Posted 3 months ago.
wmoxam
  • Authority 411
Post Body
wmoxam said in response to:
jwallace41
jwallace41’s post:
Citation Body

Two things. I think it should be ‘path’ instead of ‘path’ and to test that it actually works, you can use curl which is available on every platform pretty much for free.

Here’s the curl command: curl -X OPTIONS http://:/

Thanks!

  • Quote
  • Posted 3 months ago.
jwallace41
  • Authority 14
Post Body
jwallace41 said:

Heh, I’m glad you were able to figure out my post even with the HTML interpolation. :) For anyone else who comes along, the curl command example is: curl -X OPTIONS http://host:port/path/whatever/that/is

  • Quote
  • Posted 3 months ago.
jwallace41
  • Authority 14
Post Body
jwallace41 said:

I’ve run across another issue with this solution and have yet to solve it. Basically, any URI that is invalid generates an exception in my app. For example: http://localhost:3000/asdf/sf/adfs/ads/f <—obviously invalid

This occurs because of http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/dcaa074abf5691a933b9c55159cc7d98a02b3b2f and more information may be found at http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/6953. My expectation is that since the first route doesn’t match that the matching attempts would continue through the routes file irrespective of the HTTP method.

  • Quote
  • Posted 3 months ago.
wmoxam
  • Authority 411
Post Body
wmoxam said:

Hrmm, I’m going to have to rethink this.

  • Quote
  • Posted 3 months ago.
eddm
  • Authority 5
Post Body
eddm said:

How about rendering a 404 status in index#options_for_mopd ? It might tell anything that is sending OPTIONS requests to stop it and give up.

However, I may be full of crap and this might not work. :)

  • Quote
  • Posted 2 months ago.
clinton
  • Authority 5
Post Body
clinton said:

I’m returning HTTP 405 – Method Not Allowed. Hopefully Microsoft Office will take the hint.

  • Quote
  • Posted 2 months ago.
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