Redmine

I am using the Java API for Redmine which is using the Redmine REST API to communicate with Redmine and I am not able to retrieve user data because of the following problem:

In a Redmine environment with NO public projects, when making a user REST request like

GET /users/4.xml

it returns a 404 immediately instead of asking for authentication. When for example issues are requested, it works like this:

1. > GET /issues/1.xml
2. < 401 Unauthorized
3. > again GET /issues/1.xml with authentication information
4. < 200 OK with the requested data

I am using Redmine 1.2.1 and this is reproduceable with mod_passenger on Apache httpd2 and Webbrick, so I guess it is a small glitch in Redmine.

It only happens on Redmine installations with no public projects, as soon as there is one public project, the request for users is working the same way as the one for issues.

Unfortunately I am completely unfamiliar with Ruby, Rails and Redmine, could you give some advice on how to solve this problem?