Does the API support multipart/form-data?

[rijkvanzanten]

For uploading images, next to sending the image's data string through a regular POST request?

[wellingguzman]

It doesn't support multipart/form-data, (it will ignore the upload data).

[rijkvanzanten]

Question 2:

Why not?

Q 3:

Can the API support multipart/form-data?

[wellingguzman]

Why not?

No reason at all, we haven't implemented yet.

Can the API support multipart/form-data?

Yes it can support it. Probably the only drawback is that we can't sent user-defined information about this file, such as file title, description.

[rijkvanzanten]

the only drawback is that we can't sent user-defined information about this file, such as file title, description.

If we include fields in the same form with the name matching the database column, it should be doable right?

[wellingguzman]

The file data uploaded will replace the field containing the user-defined (if any) title, description etc.

Example:

Currently we can do this:

{
  "title": "new article",
  "header_image": {
    "title": "new article header image",
    "description": "a happy team",
    "data": "<base-64-data>"
  }
}

We send user-specific information such as title and description.

On the other hand when we use multipart the data for header_image that field information becomes only the file data: rough example below:

POST /_/items/articles HTTP/1.1
Host: directus-api.local
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----Boundary

----Boundary
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="title"

new article
----Boundary
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="header_image"; filename="header_image.jpg"
Content-Type: image/jpeg

<ImageContent>
----Boundary--

The header section has the binary content of the header_image.jpg.

We can research if there's a possible way to send this information through multipart or we can create a workaround.

[rijkvanzanten]

Ahh, yeah we lose the ability to send nested values, that's true. But it would still be useful for asynchronous uploads to /files directly.

Usecase: uploading files to insert into a WYSIWYG editor