Tracking client-applications using User-Agent

Jan Algermissen <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.services.rest
Message-ID <[email protected]> 
Hi,

suppose, you expose a REST-API and want to keep track clients which you gave access to the API. Each client is given a client ID.

Straight-forward solution would be to use the Authentication (think OAuth) header to extract the client ID.

However, suppose there are some resource you do not want to protect to enable public caching.

What about asking the client developers to put the client ID in the User-Agent header. Yes, they would not have to, but let's suppose they are closely enough associated to be reliable enough. If this occasionally slips, that's no big deal. It is for monitoring purposes only. No payment-per-ID or throttling involved.

Do you have any thoughts or experiences doing something similar?

Jan
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.