371733 - URL Attachment requires "http://", else causes "no file specified" error

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Attachments & Requests, defect)

Description

[Glanville, Jay Dickon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070219 Firefox/2.0.0.2
Build Identifier: Bugzilla 2.22.2

When creating URL attachment, Bugzilla expects the URL to be prefixed with "http://", or else reports a "No file specified" error.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click the "Create a New Attachment" on a bug.
2. Fill in the following fields:
  AttachURL = www.google.ca
  Description = Google
3. Click submit, resulting in errors:
  No File Specified
  You did not specify a file to attach.
4. Click the back button.
5. Click the submit button.
  Success
Actual Results:  
After clicking submit-back-submit, URL attachment is accepted.

Expected Results:  
After clicking first submit, URL attachment is accepted.  (Ie: after step 3,
success.)

If the URL field in step 2 above contained the string "http://www.google.ca", then no error would have been reported.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

You have to specify a full URL as it will then be used as a link, so the URL has to begin with http://, https:// or ftp://. No other protocol will be accepted.

Comment 2

[Glanville, Jay Dickon]

Why will no other protocols be accepted?  Within my workplace, we use several protocols, including ssh:, telnet:, news:, sip:, mailto:, file:, etc, etc, etc.  All are valid.  See the Wikipedia article on URI scheme for a slightly more exhaustive list of valid schemes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme).

So, two questions:
1) Why limit at all?  Why not just allow the browser or OS to deal with the URI scheme through it's own protocol handlers?
2) If you're going to limit to just http:, https: and ftp:, then why is it successful on the second attempt?  (see Steps to Reproduce in comment #0)

Comment 3

[Glanville, Jay Dickon]

reopening bug due to questions in comment #2

Comment 4

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Yes, I agree, we should prepend http:// if the user doesn't type it.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Buclin]

With the work going on on bug 119703, I plan to support more protocols than just http(s) and ftp, and the "is URL" attribute is going away. www.google.ca is not a valid URL, and I don't plan to make any guess about it.