Drupal 7 - how to allow an application to access a certain drupal url (from menu hook), either with super basic url-based auth or anonymously - authentication

Question

I'm pretty new to drupal, so bear with me if I'm not using correct terms.
I'm trying to give a stupidly basic application access to a drupal url - this application cannot do any complicated authentication.
Otherwise, this drupal system needs authentication and all other menu hooks use 'access arguments' => array('access content')
Even before looking a solution for easy authentication method with drupal like http://user:password#server.com/awesome/member/12345, I've tried just giving anonymous access with the following code block in a drupal .module file
function awesome_module_menu() {
$items['awesome/member/%'] = array(
'title' => 'Awesome member',
'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
'page callback' => 'aw_memberdata_fetch',
'delivery callback' => 'aw_memberdata_deliver',
'access arguments' => TRUE // this supposedly should allow anonymous access - from the web
);
return $items;
}
I have these two functions, one to fetch the data, one to show it:
function aw_memberdata_fetch(memberId)
{
//fetch array of objects from DB
...
return $items;
}
function aw_memberdata_deliver($items)
{
switch(arg(3)) //format, comes after items
{
case 'json':
drupal_json_output($items);
break;
default:
$output = makeHtml($items); //makes HTML
drupal_deliver_html_page($output);
}
}
With an authenticated browser, this works as intented. From a browser with no auth cookie I'm allowed to see the HTML, but the results are not there, it's like the page callback function doesn't run for anon users, but delivery callback does.
How do I make this work for anon users?

Answer 1

You are using access arguments with the default user_access function for permission verification. This will basically call user_access(true) which will return
true for authenticated user (you are probably testing with the administrator account (uid = 1)) which bypasses the verification check. Administrator has full privileges.
false for anonymous users because the string value of the first argument passed to the user_access true doesn't exist as a permission setting.
You should use either use
a custom YOURMODULE_access hook which does the permission verification
declare custom permissions for your module (YOURMODULE_permission hook)
don't use permission verification by using 'access callback' => true which gives access to anonymous and authenticated users
function awesome_module_menu() {
$items['awesome/member/%'] = array(
'title' => 'Awesome member',
'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
'page callback' => 'aw_memberdata_fetch',
'delivery callback' => 'aw_memberdata_deliver',
'access callback' => true,
);
return $items;
}