Regarding these points:
Ronny Schedel wrote:
It's not working like you may think. If you access the page with 64bit
userid and a user friendly name is set, the webserver respond only a code
different from 202 with the new location (don't remember the code, it's 301
or something). You don't receive any content. Your Internet browser just
handle this redirected page and display it. Even if Valve would pass all GET
parameters to the redirected page, the webserver would still respond with
the redirected page without content in the first step.
I'm aware that this is how it works (and I already do it this way as a
workaround), but the behaviour on Valve's end should be consistent. If I
request a profile's XML feed based on their 64-bit ID, I should get that
profile's XML feed, not *either* what I requested *or* a redirect to the
wrong place.
An example (might have some typos):
1. You: GET /profiles/123456789/?xml=1
2. Webserver: 301 Location: http://steamcommunity.com/id/nicename
3. You: GET /id/nicename?xml=1
4. Webserver: 202 Content-Length: .........
This is a rough overview what happens, experienced web programmers should
understand what happens.
You suggest Valve should add the xml-parameter in step 2, but this does not
change the behaviour. You don't get any content in step 2, you have to
handle it by yourself.
While you're right there's no actual data coming back in step 2, the URL
sent back in its place is still wrong, and if they ever change how this
redirect works and I'm manipulating that URL based on assumptions about
the current system, my program could break. This is more of a problem
with how I set up my application (in C#.NET), because if it was just
serving the profile's XML feed without any redirecting, I could just
have an XmlDocument load up the feed (the .NET XmlDocument object
supports loading a document from a URI) and immediately start using the
data - instead I'm left to do a lot of unnecessary network coding just
to make sure I'm getting the right document.
-Dave
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