Java 9 HttpClient send a multipart/form-data request

Question

Below is a form:

<form action="/example/html5/demo_form.asp" method="post" 
enctype=”multipart/form-data”>
   <input type="file" name="img" />
   <input type="text" name=username" value="foo"/>
   <input type="submit" />
</form>

when will submit this form, the request will look like this:

POST /example/html5/demo_form.asp HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.143.47.59:9093
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 326
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Origin: http://10.143.47.59:9093
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryEDKBhMZFowP9Leno
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,zh-CN;q=0.6,zh;q=0.4

Request Payload
------WebKitFormBoundaryEDKBhMZFowP9Leno
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="username"

foo
------WebKitFormBoundaryEDKBhMZFowP9Leno
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="img"; filename="out.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain


------WebKitFormBoundaryEDKBhMZFowP9Leno--

please pay attention to the "Request Payload", you can see the two params in the form, the username and the img(form-data; name="img"; filename="out.txt"), and the finename is the real file name(or path) in your filesystem, you will receive the file by name(not filename) in your backend(such as spring controller).
if we use Apache Httpclient to simulate the request, we will write such code:

MultipartEntity mutiEntity = newMultipartEntity();
File file = new File("/path/to/your/file");
mutiEntity.addPart("username",new StringBody("foo", Charset.forName("utf-8")));
mutiEntity.addPart("img", newFileBody(file)); //img is name, file is path

But in java 9, We could write such code:

HttpClient client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.
        newBuilder(new URI("http:///example/html5/demo_form.asp"))
       .method("post",HttpRequest.BodyProcessor.fromString("foo"))
       .method("post", HttpRequest.BodyProcessor.fromFile(Paths.get("/path/to/your/file")))
       .build();
HttpResponse response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandler.asString());
System.out.println(response.body());

Now you see, how could I set the "name" of the param?

Answer 1

I wanted to do this for a project without having to pull in the Apache client, so I wrote a MultiPartBodyPublisher (Java 11, fyi):

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.UncheckedIOException;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.function.Supplier;

public class MultiPartBodyPublisher {
    private List<PartsSpecification> partsSpecificationList = new ArrayList<>();
    private String boundary = UUID.randomUUID().toString();

    public HttpRequest.BodyPublisher build() {
        if (partsSpecificationList.size() == 0) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Must have at least one part to build multipart message.");
        }
        addFinalBoundaryPart();
        return HttpRequest.BodyPublishers.ofByteArrays(PartsIterator::new);
    }

    public String getBoundary() {
        return boundary;
    }

    public MultiPartBodyPublisher addPart(String name, String value) {
        PartsSpecification newPart = new PartsSpecification();
        newPart.type = PartsSpecification.TYPE.STRING;
        newPart.name = name;
        newPart.value = value;
        partsSpecificationList.add(newPart);
        return this;
    }

    public MultiPartBodyPublisher addPart(String name, Path value) {
        PartsSpecification newPart = new PartsSpecification();
        newPart.type = PartsSpecification.TYPE.FILE;
        newPart.name = name;
        newPart.path = value;
        partsSpecificationList.add(newPart);
        return this;
    }

    public MultiPartBodyPublisher addPart(String name, Supplier<InputStream> value, String filename, String contentType) {
        PartsSpecification newPart = new PartsSpecification();
        newPart.type = PartsSpecification.TYPE.STREAM;
        newPart.name = name;
        newPart.stream = value;
        newPart.filename = filename;
        newPart.contentType = contentType;
        partsSpecificationList.add(newPart);
        return this;
    }

    private void addFinalBoundaryPart() {
        PartsSpecification newPart = new PartsSpecification();
        newPart.type = PartsSpecification.TYPE.FINAL_BOUNDARY;
        newPart.value = "--" + boundary + "--";
        partsSpecificationList.add(newPart);
    }

    static class PartsSpecification {

        public enum TYPE {
            STRING, FILE, STREAM, FINAL_BOUNDARY
        }

        PartsSpecification.TYPE type;
        String name;
        String value;
        Path path;
        Supplier<InputStream> stream;
        String filename;
        String contentType;

    }

    class PartsIterator implements Iterator<byte[]> {

        private Iterator<PartsSpecification> iter;
        private InputStream currentFileInput;

        private boolean done;
        private byte[] next;

        PartsIterator() {
            iter = partsSpecificationList.iterator();
        }

        @Override
        public boolean hasNext() {
            if (done) return false;
            if (next != null) return true;
            try {
                next = computeNext();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                throw new UncheckedIOException(e);
            }
            if (next == null) {
                done = true;
                return false;
            }
            return true;
        }

        @Override
        public byte[] next() {
            if (!hasNext()) throw new NoSuchElementException();
            byte[] res = next;
            next = null;
            return res;
        }

        private byte[] computeNext() throws IOException {
            if (currentFileInput == null) {
                if (!iter.hasNext()) return null;
                PartsSpecification nextPart = iter.next();
                if (PartsSpecification.TYPE.STRING.equals(nextPart.type)) {
                    String part =
                            "--" + boundary + "\r\n" +
                            "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=" + nextPart.name + "\r\n" +
                            "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n\r\n" +
                            nextPart.value + "\r\n";
                    return part.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
                }
                if (PartsSpecification.TYPE.FINAL_BOUNDARY.equals(nextPart.type)) {
                    return nextPart.value.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
                }
                String filename;
                String contentType;
                if (PartsSpecification.TYPE.FILE.equals(nextPart.type)) {
                    Path path = nextPart.path;
                    filename = path.getFileName().toString();
                    contentType = Files.probeContentType(path);
                    if (contentType == null) contentType = "application/octet-stream";
                    currentFileInput = Files.newInputStream(path);
                } else {
                    filename = nextPart.filename;
                    contentType = nextPart.contentType;
                    if (contentType == null) contentType = "application/octet-stream";
                    currentFileInput = nextPart.stream.get();
                }
                String partHeader =
                        "--" + boundary + "\r\n" +
                        "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=" + nextPart.name + "; filename=" + filename + "\r\n" +
                        "Content-Type: " + contentType + "\r\n\r\n";
                return partHeader.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
            } else {
                byte[] buf = new byte[8192];
                int r = currentFileInput.read(buf);
                if (r > 0) {
                    byte[] actualBytes = new byte[r];
                    System.arraycopy(buf, 0, actualBytes, 0, r);
                    return actualBytes;
                } else {
                    currentFileInput.close();
                    currentFileInput = null;
                    return "\r\n".getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

You can use it approximately like so:

MultiPartBodyPublisher publisher = new MultiPartBodyPublisher()
       .addPart("someString", "foo")
       .addPart("someInputStream", () -> this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("test.txt"), "test.txt", "text/plain")
       .addPart("someFile", pathObject);
HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
       .uri(URI.create("https://www.example.com/dosomething"))
       .header("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + publisher.getBoundary())
       .timeout(Duration.ofMinutes(1))
       .POST(publisher.build())
       .build();

Note that addPart for input streams actually takes a Supplier<InputStream> and not just an InputStream.

Answer 2

You can use Methanol. It contains a MultipartBodyPublisher with a convenient and easy to use MultipartBodyPublisher.Builder. Here is an example using it (JDK11 or later is required):

var multipartBody = MultipartBodyPublisher.newBuilder()
    .textPart("foo", "foo_text")
    .filePart("bar", Path.of("path/to/file.txt"))
    .formPart("baz", BodyPublishers.ofInputStream(() -> ...))
    .build();
var request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
    .uri(URI.create("https://example.com/"))
    .POST(multipartBody)
    .build();

Note that you can add any BodyPublisher or HttpHeaders you want. Check out the docs for more info.