Posting a File and Associated Data to a RESTful WebService preferably as JSON

Question

This is probably going to be a stupid question but I\'m having one of those nights. In an application I am developing RESTful API and we want the client to send data as JSON

Answer 1

Since the only missing example is the ANDROID example, I'll add it. This technique uses a custom AsyncTask that should be declared inside your Activity class.

private class UploadFile extends AsyncTask<Void, Integer, String> {
    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        // set a status bar or show a dialog to the user here
        super.onPreExecute();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) {
        // progress[0] is the current status (e.g. 10%)
        // here you can update the user interface with the current status
    }

    @Override
    protected String doInBackground(Void... params) {
        return uploadFile();
    }

    private String uploadFile() {

        String responseString = null;
        HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost("http://example.com/upload-file");

        try {
            AndroidMultiPartEntity ampEntity = new AndroidMultiPartEntity(
                new ProgressListener() {
                    @Override
                        public void transferred(long num) {
                            // this trigger the progressUpdate event
                            publishProgress((int) ((num / (float) totalSize) * 100));
                        }
            });

            File myFile = new File("/my/image/path/example.jpg");

            ampEntity.addPart("fileFieldName", new FileBody(myFile));

            totalSize = ampEntity.getContentLength();
            httpPost.setEntity(ampEntity);

            // Making server call
            HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
            HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();

            int statusCode = httpResponse.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
            if (statusCode == 200) {
                responseString = EntityUtils.toString(httpEntity);
            } else {
                responseString = "Error, http status: "
                        + statusCode;
            }

        } catch (Exception e) {
            responseString = e.getMessage();
        }
        return responseString;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
        // if you want update the user interface with upload result
        super.onPostExecute(result);
    }

}

So, when you want to upload your file just call:

new UploadFile().execute();

Answer 2

@RequestMapping(value = "/uploadImageJson", method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public @ResponseBody Object jsongStrImage(@RequestParam(value="image") MultipartFile image, @RequestParam String jsonStr) {
-- use  com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper convert Json String to Object
}

Answer 3

I know that this thread is quite old, however, I am missing here one option. If you have metadata (in any format) that you want to send along with the data to upload, you can make a single multipart/related request.

The Multipart/Related media type is intended for compound objects consisting of several inter-related body parts.

You can check RFC 2387 specification for more in-depth details.

Basically each part of such a request can have content with different type and all parts are somehow related (e.g. an image and it metadata). The parts are identified by a boundary string, and the final boundary string is followed by two hyphens.

Example:

POST /upload HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hostname.com
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary=xyz
Content-Length: [actual-content-length]

--xyz
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

{
    "name": "Sample image",
    "desc": "...",
    ...
}

--xyz
Content-Type: image/jpeg

[image data]
[image data]
[image data]
...
--foo_bar_baz--

Answer 4

FormData Objects: Upload Files Using Ajax

XMLHttpRequest Level 2 adds support for the new FormData interface. FormData objects provide a way to easily construct a set of key/value pairs representing form fields and their values, which can then be easily sent using the XMLHttpRequest send() method.

function AjaxFileUpload() {
    var file = document.getElementById("files");
    //var file = fileInput;
    var fd = new FormData();
    fd.append("imageFileData", file);
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open("POST", '/ws/fileUpload.do');
    xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
        if (xhr.readyState == 4) {
             alert('success');
        }
        else if (uploadResult == 'success')
             alert('error');
    };
    xhr.send(fd);
}

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData

Answer 5

You could try using https://square.github.io/okhttp/ library. You can set the request body to multipart and then add the file and json objects separately like so:

MultipartBody requestBody = new MultipartBody.Builder()
                .setType(MultipartBody.FORM)
                .addFormDataPart("uploadFile", uploadFile.getName(), okhttp3.RequestBody.create(uploadFile, MediaType.parse("image/png")))
                .addFormDataPart("file metadata", json)
                .build();

        Request request = new Request.Builder()
                .url("https://uploadurl.com/uploadFile")
                .post(requestBody)
                .build();

        try (Response response = client.newCall(request).execute()) {
            if (!response.isSuccessful()) throw new IOException("Unexpected code " + response);

            logger.info(response.body().string());