Sending POST Requests
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We can send simple POST requests to upstream systems with the as follows:
The supplied JSON response from https://httpbin.org/ reflects the request we've just sent:
The response shows that FLAT sends the data as text/plain:
📎 By the way, have you noticed how we XML-encoded the ampersand as
&in the request?
To send the data as URL-encoded form data answer=41+1&foo" we also have to set the MIME type accordingly:
Good! But still not what we wanted! The + got lost. Not only do we have to consider the XML context we're in (&), but we also need to URL-encode the data ourselves, as the body field contains the raw POST data as they will be sent upstream:
Yeah, that hurts pretty much!
Thus, for submitting URL-encoded form data, the post field is the way to go.
Sending JSON data is easy. We just supply the desired JSON as object for value:
The MIME type is set automatically:
To send XML data we set the MIME type to text/xml and supply the XML payload in the body field:
📎 Instead of using
<![CDATA[…]]>we could have written<answer>….
Sending XML like this is again rather ugly. Fortunately, the body does not have to be placed inline. We can also make use of the body field's src property to specify a location from where the body content should be read:
This way is binary safe, so we're able to send arbitrary content, an image for example:
As before, the MIME type can be explicitly set with mime or, if missing, FLAT tries to determine it automatically:
Let's now send some data using the . Since the HTTP method will be automatically set to POST, we don't need to specify it explicitly:
Or, with the help of the :
The to the rescue!
We can achieve the same result with the following, much simpler request using the . The POST data is assembled automatically, URL-encoding included:
To send data from a JSON file we might use the :
See for a general way to send content from a file.