POST array data to Express gets parsed out as JSON

Question

My app is Node.js using Express.

Sending this test data from my client using jQuery POST:

{
title: 'hello',
notes: [
{title: 'note 1'},
{title: 'note 2'}
]

}

And this is the result in my server code:

{ title: 'hello', notes: { '0': { title: 'note 1' }, '1': { title: 'note 2' } } }

I want to get the array of notes to insert into my DB as an Array. What am I missing?

---

As I can't add an answer myself for 8 hours (wtf?) BUT it does not really answer why Express.bodyParser does not parse JSON correctly

Ok I can get it to work by using:

JSON.stringify ( data )

on the client then server side using

JSON.parse( req.rawBody )

This does feel wrong and why does Express.bodyParser not parse JSON correctly?!

Answer 1

On your client:

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  data: JSON.stringify(data),
  contentType: 'application/json',
  url: '/endpoint'
});

On your server:

console.log('POST: ',req.body);

The problem is jQuery mucks around with your data before sending it. If you set the right MIME type, than it leaves you free.

Answer 2

Can you post your client side jQuery code, please? By default jQuery will send data as urlencoded, not JSON. See this question's answer for the way to ensure jQuery sends real JSON data.

FYI the express/connect bodyParser middleware simply uses JSON.parse to parse JSON (and qs.parse to parse urlencoded data). I don't think there are any glaring bugs in those code. Thus I think you should double-check the data you are sending from the browser.