Issue with Body Argument for POST request

Question

I am attempting to create a new team in our instance of Azure Devops through the Devops REST API. This is being done through R with the package 'httr' for the POST request and 'jsonlite' for the toJSON function.

I have been utilising the documentation on Microsoft ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/core/teams/create?view=azure-devops-rest-5.1 ) to structure the request correctly but keep getting a 400 error (Bad Request).

I am an administrator for the group so have permissions to create teams and the url is correct as I can return data with a GET request.

For the body argument I am using the following code;

    args <- list(name = "my new team")
    body <- toJSON(args, auto_unbox = TRUE)

Printing 'body' to the console returns

    {"name":"my new team"}

which looks consistent with the JSON request body in the Microsoft documentation.

The code for the POST request is below;

    create.task <- POST(paste0("https://dev.azure.com/",org.id,"/_apis/projects/",
                   project.id,"/teams?api-version=5.1"), 
                   encode = "json", 
                   authenticate(username, token, type = "basic"), 
                   body = body,
                   verbose())

This will return the following error message rather than creating the new Team in Devops.

    "HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
    <- Cache-Control: no-cache
    <- Pragma: no-cache
    <- Content-Length: 446
    <- Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
    <- Expires: -1"

Unfortunately, this is not reproduce-able but I wanted to see if there is an obvious error that I am making.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't think it is necessarily a problem with your Authorization. I tested this rest api in Postman and authenticated with PAT. The result of the test is that the team can be created successfully.

Answer 2

Thanks to Hugh Lin for the suggestion to go through Postman. From this I got my authorization token and managed to get my request to work. I then exported the code snippet in cURL and used https://curl.trillworks.com/#r to convert the curl command to R httr.

Another difference to my early approach is that I set the Authorization, Host and Content Type with add_headers, and the api-version in the query.

The code below is what I used;

require(httr)

headers = c(
  `Authorization` = 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=',
  `Content-Type` = 'application/json',
  `Host` = 'dev.azure.com'
)

params = list(
  `api-version` = '5.1'
)

data <- toJSON(list(name = "My New Team"), auto_unbox = TRUE, pretty = TRUE)

res <- httr::POST(url = 'https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/projects/{projectId}/teams',
                  httr::add_headers(.headers=headers), 
                  query = params, 
                  body = data)

This successfully created the new team.

> status_code(res)
[1] 201