Symfony REST file upload over PUT method

Question

I have a REST service where I want to update a file over PUT. When I use POST I used the following to get the uploaded file:

/**
 * @var Request $request
 */
$request->files->get('file');

How to get an uploaded file send as PUT in Symfony Framework?

Answer 1

When you receive a POST request, you get a form submitted with one or more fields, and these fields include any files (possibly more than one file). The Content-Type is multipart/form-data.

When you PUT a file, the file's data is the request body. It's like the opposite of downloading a file with GET, where the file's content is the response body. In this case, if you receive a JPG file via a PUT request, the Content-Type will be image/jpeg. Of course this means you can only submit one file with each PUT request.

You should therefore use $request->getContent() to receive the data. If the content has other information in addition to the submitted file, then technically speaking it is a malformed PUT request, and should probably be sent as a POST instead.

Although you can't send any other fields with a PUT request, you can still use the query string to provide some additional short fields where appropriate. For example you might upload a file via a PUT request to /api/record/123/attachment?filename=example.pdf. This would allow you to receive both an uploaded file, another data field (the filename) and the ID (123) of the record to attach the upload to.

Answer 2

The easiest way where you don't need to change your api you submit the file and data you want to change as method POST and add query parameter ?_method=PUT to the url. In your front controller app.php/index.php you need to enable this feature with:

Request::enableHttpMethodParameterOverride();