Can't access request data in production but can in local env

Question

I'm working with a legacy Cakephp 2 app and need to create users via AJAX post on another domain.

I've got the whole thing working nicely in my local environment but have been battling with my prod environment.

I am using Postman to form a consistent Post request and setting the various headers as well as setting data values.

Locally: I send a post request to a URL and var_dump the entire request object into the response. I can see that my data is populated. $this->request->data['email'] returns exactly what I expect.

Production: I deploy the exact same code and my data array is completely empty.

I have set my Access-Control-Allow headers and I'm not getting any authisation issues. I can interact with the request within the application but I can not access any data. The request is the same request just a different endpoint.

I am running identical versions of PHP and exactly the same codebase.

Can anyone think of any environmental factors that might affect the request data?

This is my controller code in brief:

public function remoteadd() {

        var_dump($this->request);
        if ($this->request->is('ajax')) {
            $this->disableCache();
                $this->autoRender = false;

                $this->response->type('json');

                $this->User->create();
                $gen_pass = $this->generatePassword();
                $this->request->data['password'] = $gen_pass;

                $emailAddr = $this->request->data['email'];


                // Check if this email exists
                $conditions = array(
                    'User.email' => $emailAddr,
                );

                if (!$this->User->hasAny($conditions)) {

                    if ($this->User->save($this->request->data)) {


                        $this->response->statusCode(200);
                        $this->response->body(json_encode(
                            array('status' => 'success', 'message' => 'New account successfully created')
                        ));

                    }

                } else {

                    $this->response->statusCode(500);
                    $this->response->body(json_encode(
                        array('status' => 'error', 'message' => 'Email address already exists')
                    ));

                }


                $this->response->send();
                $this->_stop();
        }


    }

Answer 1

It seems like the issue related to CORS preflight. Two requests are actually triggered. The first is a preflight which given my controller action is not returning any data as it's not actually a legitimate post request. The second request/response has the data appropriately loaded as expected.