Do stuff with multiple files when uploading them using node-formidable with Express

Question

Uploading files with node-formidable on Express is as simple as this

app.post('/upload', function(req, res) {
    // do something with req.files
});

The files are now saved

The form: (multiple="multiple" is a HTML5 feature that allows users to select multiple files to upload)

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="upload">
    <input type="text" name="title"/>
    <input type="file" name="upload" multiple="multiple"/>
    <input type="submit" value="upload" id="s3form_submit"/>
</form>

If i add this line to the upload code

console.log(req.files.upload.path);

When uploading one file, the path shows up in the console. But when I upload more than one file it just says undefined in the console. How do I get the log stuff for each file? Using a for loop?

The node-formidable example on GitHub logs every file when you upload several: https://github.com/felixge/node-formidable/blob/master/example/upload.js (I tried using this code in Express, didn’t work) It does exactly what I want, but how do I do this in an Express app?

Answer 1

It works by moving the line below to the bottom of the app.configure function. Read about the importance of order regarding middleware in Express here: http://expressjs.com/guide.html#middleware

app.use(express.bodyParser({ uploadDir:__dirname + '/public/uploads' }));

And by using this handler:

app.post('/upload', function(req, res){
    var form = new formidable.IncomingForm(),
    files = [],
    fields = [];
    form.on('field', function(field, value) {
        fields.push([field, value]);
    })
    form.on('file', function(field, file) {
        console.log(file.name);
        files.push([field, file]);
    })
    form.on('end', function() {
        console.log('done');
        res.redirect('/forms');
    });
    form.parse(req);
});