How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Question

How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Answer 1

If you had the problem of doing:

request.open('POST',url,true);
request.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
request.send("data="+JSON.stringify(data));

and in dev tools you still se it is doing a GET then that means that your url is in the following format:

http://example.com/folder

Meaning it should be:

http://example.com/folder/

Its a very bizarre error maybe not related with your question but I ve had it a couple of times and it should be out there as it looks seriously dangerous. This happened to me when using an apache 2 server on Ubuntu 14.04, with not much configuration.

Answer 2

Use an HTML form that specifies post as the method:

<form method="post" action="/my/url/">
    ...
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit using POST" />
</form>

If you had to make it happen as a link (not recommended), you could have an onclick handler dynamically build a form and submit it.

<script type="text/javascript">
function submitAsPost(url) {
    var postForm = document.createElement('form');
    postForm.action = url;
    postForm.method = 'post';
    var bodyTag = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
    bodyTag.appendChild(postForm);
    postForm.submit();
}
</script>
<a href="/my/url" onclick="submitAsPost(this.href); return false;">this is my post link</a>

If you need to enforce this on the server side, you should check the HTTP method and if it's not equal to POST, send an HTTP 405 response code (method not allowed) back to the browser and exit. Exactly how you implement that will depend on your programming language/framework, etc.

Answer 3

The above submitAsPost() function is a good and elegant solution but it has a problem - if the URL is too long some browsers (including Firefox and IE) will return an error. Since many of us use POST in order to bypass this very limitation, I suggest this solution:

// submit a URL using post
function submitAsPost(url) {
    var bodyTag = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
    var postForm = document.createElement('form');
    bodyTag.appendChild(postForm);
    postForm.method = 'POST';

    var serverAndParams = url.split("?");
    postForm.action = serverAndParams[0];
    var params = null;
    try
    {
      var paramsAndHash = serverAndParams[1].split("#");
      params = paramsAndHash[0]; 
      var attrList = params.split("&");
      for (var i = 0; i < attrList.length; i++)
      {
        try
        {
          var keyValue = attrList[i].split("=");
          var el = document.createElement('input');
          el.type="hidden";
          el.name=keyValue[0];
          var value = keyValue[1];
          value = value.replace(/\+/g, ' ');
          el.value=decodeURIComponent(value);
          postForm.appendChild(el);
        }
        catch(error){}
      } 
    }
    catch(error){}

    postForm.submit();
    bodyTag.removeChild(postForm);
}

Tested with Firefox, Chrome and IE.

Answer 4

<form method="post">

If you're GETting a URL, you're GETting it, not POSTing it. You certainly can't cause a browser to issue a POST request via its location bar.

Answer 5

This is a little late in the game but I ran across this and found that HTML 5 made some changes. You can use the input tag to add formmethod (thus selecting post). This worked for me.

see : http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_input_formmethod.asp

Answer 6

If you're trying to test something, I'd suggest using Fiddler to craft your http requests. It will allow you to specify the action verb (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc) as well as request contents. If you're trying to test a very specific request from a link but with POST instead, then you can monitor the requests your browser is making and reissue it only with the modified POST action.