Is it possible to upload file via $.ajax(options) or xhr.send(file) only?

Question

I'm using file api and xhr2 spec. I created an uploader (backed by flash for older browsers) that was using FormData and $.ajax(options) where the FormData object with File was part of options.data object. Everything was working.

Now I decided to remove FormData because of weak browser support. And I can't figure a way to upload the file other than

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.setRequestHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
xhr.setRequestHeader("X-Requested-With", "XMLHttpRequest");
xhr.setRequestHeader("X-File-Name", file.name);
xhr.send(file);

Which doesn't return Promise that I can use in the recursion function.

My code is like this :

   startUpload: function() {
        var that = this;
        that.recurseSend(that.queue);       
    },

    _initProgressListener: function (options, file) {
        var that = this;
        var xhr = $.ajaxSettings.xhr();
        options.contentType = 'multipart/form-data';        
        options.processData = false;
        options.type = 'POST';
        // WHAT TO DO HERE TO avoid FormData???? What ever I put into options.data - fails

        /* THIS WOULD WORK
        var formData = new FormData();
        formData.append('file', file);
        options.data = formData;
        */            

        if (xhr.upload && xhr.upload.addEventListener) {
            xhr.upload.addEventListener('progress', function (e) {
                that._onProgress(e, file);
            }, false);
            options.xhr = function () {
                return xhr;
            };
        }
    }, 

    recurseSend: function (queue) { 
        var file = queue.pop();
        if(file != undefined) {
            var that = this;
            var options = that.options;    
            that._initProgressListener(options, file);

            var send = function() {
                jqXHR = ($.ajax(options)).done(function(result, textStatus, jqXHR) {
                        that._onDone(result, textStatus, jqXHR, file);
                        queue.stats['successful_uploads']++;
                    }).fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                        that._onFail(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown, file);
                        queue.stats['upload_errors']++;
                    }).always(function(result, textStatus, jqXHR) {
                        that._onAlways(result, textStatus, jqXHR, file);
                        queue.stats['files_queued']--;
                        that.recurseSend(queue);
                    });
                    return jqXHR;
            };

            this._beforeSend(file);              
            return send();
        }
    },

To make it short, $.ajax(options) resolves into xhr.send(formData) if options.data = FormData but how do I make it resolve into xhr.send(file) ?

EDITED: I was playing with it and if I set options.data = file; then $.ajax(options) executes xhr.send(theFile); but with error Error: INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11

and the request is sent as POST multipart/form-data request, but without the multipart body with file in it

And if I put it into options.data = {file: file}; it is serialized no matter if processData property is set to true or not.

Answer 1

You can manually generate the MIME data for the upload from the HTML5 file data read using FileReader or similar APIs. Check out: https://github.com/coolaj86/html5-formdata . This will do more or less that, although it depends on getAsBinary() -- changing it to also be able to use FileReader and readAsBinaryString() would probably be more cross-browser-compatible.

Note that this still won't work at all in IE7/8, and as others have said, there is no way to do it without resorting to Flash or iframes. That being said, if you're using File, presumably you don't care about IE7 or IE8 anyway...