Just wanted a clarification of the form content types:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded: This is where you can send params encoded with the url.
multipart/form-data: ??
I need to send a JSON in the post (so it would have the type: text/x-json, I guess).
So the question is, is multipart/form-data suitable for this purpose / is application/x-www-form-urlencoded better?
Also, would it be possible to send some params encoded in the url, and some data in the json?
multipart/form-data
is used when you want to upload files to the server. Please check this article for details.
I have wondered the same thing. Basically it appears that the html spec has different content types for html and form data. Json only has a single content type.
According to the spec, a POST of json data should have the content-type:
application/json
Relevant portion of the HTML spec
6.7 Content types (MIME types)
...
Examples of content types include "text/html", "image/png", "image/gif", "video/mpeg", "text/css", and "audio/basic".17.13.4 Form content types
...
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
This is the default content type. Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows
Relevant portion of the JSON spec
- IANA Considerations
The MIME media type for JSON text is application/json.
It looks like people answered the first part of your question (use application/json).
For the second part: It is perfectly legal to send query parameters in a HTTP POST Request.
Example:
POST /members?id=1234 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Content-Type: application/json
{"email":"[email protected]"}
Query parameters are commonly used in a POST request to refer to an existing resource. The above example would update the email address of an existing member with the id of 1234.
Source: Stackoverflow.com