-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 André,
(Man, I need to get a keyboard mapping for "é". This copy-and-paste thing is such a drag...) On 3/16/2009 6:09 PM, André Warnier wrote: > Christopher Schultz wrote: >> >> Quick question: multipart/form-data is typically used for file upload... >> why not use application/x-www-form-urlencoded instead? I realize the >> problem is that certain browsers do not send the proper charset in the >> Content-Type, but I'd like to understand your affinity for >> multipart/form-data. >> > This : > http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13 > See the note in green at the end of 17.13.1 Form submission method. The W3C docs for 'enctype' mentions that multipart/form-data should be used with <input type="file" /> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-enctype > Plus, the fact that our applications (area : document management) very > often do offer the possibility to upload a file from within forms. Gotcha. > Plus, the fact that the same applications often do offer the possibility > to submit very large non-USASCII text fields. The size of the fields shouldn't be an issue, unless you want to stream the data yourself. But you mentioned using getParameter, so you're /not/ streaming the data yourself. > Plus, the fact that most of my activity relates to users who are not > mainly English-speaking and do not use a US keyboard to fill-in web forms. > Plus, the fact that having seen HTTP/HTML being born, I remember the > time when URL's were typically limited in size, in a manner inconsistent > between platforms. That might still be the case. It is :) > Somewhat abusively I admit, I took an early aversion to > application/x-www-form-urlencoded, as synonymous to GET, to non-capable > of anything but US-ASCII (ok, iso-8859-1 at a stretch, but see the above > green note) and to "nobody agrees as to the proper percent encoding and > at what moment it should take place or not". No, it will work and its better that GET because it's encoded using the Content-Type of the request, rather than God-knows-what given the browser settings. > The multipart/form-data encoding does not have all of these > connotations, and should be a foolproof way for a browser to send data > to a server without any size limit or charset ambiguity. The only differences I see between multipart/form-data and application/x-www-urlencoded encoding types are the W3C's choice for the default and the servlet spec's requirement (both x-www) and the W3C's statement about <input type="file" />. > It is also a big disappointment to see (you are right, I checked) that > the Servlet Spec does not foresee a simple method to get the parameter > values if they are posted via the multipart/form-data encoding method. This is because the implication of using multipart/form-data is that the app code will read its own stream. If you upload a 100MB file, do you want that whole thing in memory as a (useless) String value? > That is probably because for 10 years or so, I have been using this > under Apache and perl without any problems at all : I just use the > equivalent of GetParameter() there, without having to worry a jot about > the request encoding; and why should I have to ? So what is Perl's default charset? I find it hard to believe that Perl just magically works with the same missing charset information. > Read the body myself and parsing it ? in 2009 ? Yes, read it yourself. You told the servlet container that you wanted to do it. I'm actually surprised that getParameter() gets you any of your POST form data when using multipart/form-data. You never did say how it failed: do you get a bad String (misinterpreted) or do you get null because getParameter didn't parse the request? > Now come on, I am sure that there must exist some standard Java library > usable in a servlet context, and which does that, no ? You can use commons-upload, which was intended to be used with file uploads, and will probably read "simple" multipart/form-data fields as well. - -chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkm+2qcACgkQ9CaO5/Lv0PASywCcDJ1ZonoXKXuHp7SyUa3M6qeD /ogAnii33RObyJ6HJvLkLEyBf+F8jQKZ =3ArQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
