When working on a cross runtime Zinc/AIR method method of posting files to a remote server, I came across Mike Stead’s URLFileVariable and URLRequestBuilder classes which makes the process of uploading multiple files (or ByteArray’s of data) via an HTTP POST much easier. Click here get his code
The basic concept is this: assuming you have one or more ByteArray’s of file data and the filenames to go with them, you prepare one or more URLFileVariable’s. The URLFIleVariable’s are added to the URLVariables as follows:
// create the standard "URLVariables"
var vars:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
// lets set a ByteArray of JPG data with the filename "myFile.jpg" against the POST variable "file1"
vars.file1 = new URLFileVariable(myByteArray, "myFIle.jpg");
Now at this point, as in my case, I am passing these URLVariables to either an AIR implementation of an HTTP client (using URLStream) or a Zinc implementation (using AS3HttpClientLib). This was all described here in another post.
In my AIR implementation of an HTTP client abstraction I use an URLStream and the code that deals with the URLVariables works something like the following.
/* Standard URLStream code that interacts with URLVariables
which contain Mike Stead's URLFIleVariables and uses his URLRequestBuilder */
var stream:URLStream = new URLStream();
// [ REGISTER for your stream listeners here...
/* use Mike Stead's URLRequestBuilder to properly build the
URLRequest and encode it to contain all the multi-part data and filenames in the "vars" created above */
var req:URLRequest = new URLRequestBuilder(vars).build();
// ensure a POST because URLRequestBuilder only specifies POST if the variables contains files.
req.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
// define some URL to post to
req.url = "http://my.something.com.xyz/url_to_post_to.xyz";
// fire off the POST
stream.load(req);
// as the load completes, your event handlers for the stream should take over
Now on the other hand, if you happen to be using AS3HttpClientLib (as described in one of my other posts) you will be coding the equivalent of the URLStream code above, however using AS3HttpClientLib as follows. Here we do not use the URLRequestBuilder but simply manually retrieve the appropriate information from Mike's URLFileVariable instance.
....
// our AS3HttpClientLib HttpClient
var client:HttpClient = new HttpClient();
...
// [Remember to setup your "client" event hooks as described in the AS3HttpClientLib docs here]
// create a new POST request
var postReq:HttpRequest = new Post();
// lets create an Array to hold all the different "parts" of this multipart post
var parts:Array = new Array();
/* lets push the URLFileVariable we created earlier into the parts Array
according to how AS3HttpClientLib expects it, as a Part object. Here
we are simply creating a new Part and populating it with the data
that we defined up above when we created the URLFileVariable */
parts.push(new Part("file1",vars.file1.data, "application/octet-stream", [{name:"filename",value:vars.file1.name}]));
// create a multipart that points to the "parts" Array
var mp:Multipart = new Multipart(parts);
postReq.setMultipart(mp);
// create a URI
var uri:URI = new URI("http://my.something.com.xyz/url_to_post_to.xyz");
// fire off the request
client.request(uri,postReq);
Thanks again to Mike Stead’s UrlFileVariable and URLRequestBuilder classes for helping me make an generic HTTP multipart post process easier and I hope my post will give those reading some help along the way on implementing their own.
This is a review of the book “Spring Recipes” by Gary Mak
