http() function isn't working

Well, it looks like my forum scraper project is dead. Too bad... I had just finished an HTML view with a numbered code view with scroll. Threads and posts could be pinned, spam could be flagged and filtered, posts could be viewed by author.

The code in the link on page 2 of this thread works in the browser version, but not with Ninox.com (btw, it used to). It doesn't return an error code, but rather, just the year in a full page view in the browser. When I refresh the page, it will go back to the database view, but wil loop back to the year again.

I was doing some research and found this article regarding CORS-anywhere https://medium.com/certik/cors-anywhere-the-dangers-of-misconfigured-third-party-software-df232aae144c 

It's not the same as Steven's plug-in, but I thought it was an interesting read.

Ok, I figured out it does work in the browser version as long as I put the response.result in the raw() function which is what I want anyway. I still does not work in the Mac app though.

Sent 3rd email request for information regarding this issue today. Have not received a reply for either of my previous 2 requests for information.

Update: I just finished a Zoom meeting with Sam at Ninox and was told this functionality that I developed my app around was never intended to be available in the Mac app. So, my take away is that the functionality exists, but has been removed from the Mac app and is now only available in the browser version. You can draw your own conclusions about that... €. I was told that other users have complained about this loss of functionality, but it remains to be seen if it will be returned. 

I want to add that running my code through the browser version is incredibly slow. I haven't tried wrapping all of my user defined functions in do as server, but at this point I think I have pretty much lost interest in working with a product where functionality is disabled without notifying developers first.

Update: I received an email Friday a couple of hours after my Zoom meeting with support...

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Hi Sean,

thank you for the meeting today.
I need to apologize, I think I misunderstood something. Let me clarify the issue and what we will do.
It is right, that it was possible and is supposed to be possible to make http requests and receive the response from the Mac App.
It is not possible to make another service send a request to a local or iCloud database, but I think you knew this already and used it the correct way all the time.

Since one of our last updates we integrated a new internal feature which also included an upgrade to the latest security standards.
Because of this, some API calls don't work because the origin (in that case the origin of the local database) is unknown to the service receiving the request.
For some reason this also happens when a local database is sending a request to ninox.com.
As for ninox.com, it is an issue we can fix. I forwarded this to our developers already.
But we can't influence other websites and servers.

We hope that we can release the fix in the near future.
Thanks for your patience.

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Hopefully, this will be resolved soon. I also want to point out that making an http call to a local file saved in a Ninox database isn't working either. It used to work and can be useful when you want to extract all or part of a text file.

Not fixed in Version 3.3.4 

Hi Mel,

Thank you again for your kind words. I'm afraid I'm not in the category of users they are trying to lure - No-Co, Lo-Co's.

As long as I'm still learning and not hitting too many walls, I'll continue to work with Ninox. I agree that there are some fundamental features that are missing like changing app colors or choosing different fonts. That is easy stuff and the kind of shiny baubles that I would think No-Co, Lo-Co users would be attracted to.

Ninox are very fortunate that they have an enthusiastic user base. Birger has 3 forum accounts and hasn't used his official one in over a year. I don't know if he even works there anymore, but he seemed to be the most knowledgeable of the tech support personnel. Unless the context is unreleased functionality, I think the user base knows more about how to use the product than any current tech support agent they have. Support, feel free to speak up.

Best regards,

Sean

Hi Steven,

I tried that and it still doesn't work. As you can see from the contents of the email from support, they acknowledge the functionality was disabled in the Mac app. I have tried wrapping all my UDFs in do as server in the browser version and it is simply unusable. It would take just a couple of seconds in the Mac app to scrape a single forum thread, but it takes an indeterminable amount of time in the browser version because I am unwilling to watch the spinning wheel of doom for very long and I Force Quit the browser session.

In this thread https://ninox.com/en/forum/ideas-and-suggestions-5abb9f4f45eda7ea1e75ed02/field-grouping-layout-element-5cd9e19a30c4436c2e2e0fda?post=5f4c62a28dfe7919e5b3904a&page=1 I point out to Dean that I scraped 1000 threads, some of those have more than one page to scrape, in about 25 minutes. I could probably only scrape 5 in the browser version if it worked at all.

Regards,

Sean

Hi Karen,

Thank you :)

Still not fixed - version 3.4.2

Hi Phil,

I am able to access API endpoints like Google Translate, but not a general web address like google.com or ninox.com which I was able to do until 3.0 or later. I also used to be able to open local files using the http() function and they broke that too.

This is all I've gotten that could be considered official...

Ninox doesn't participate in the forum anymore and, as you can see, the email I got from support lacks credibility on this topic at this point.