Forcing multipart/form-data on POST with no files to upload.

[Jonathan Williamson]

I have an annoying form that I can use with my web browser to POST to, that I cannot replicate using guzzle at the moment.

The form requires the content-type to be multipart/form-data.

Using firebug I can see that the form request/response headers and body look like this:

1. Request Headers

1. Accept:
   text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
2. Accept-Encoding:
   gzip,deflate,sdch
3. Accept-Language:
   en-US,en;q=0.8
4. Cache-Control:
   max-age=0
5. Connection:
   keep-alive
6. Content-Length:
   849
7. Content-Type:
   multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09
8. Cookie:
   auth=5e6b3363d9c787f54abe9da01563e6bb
9. DNT:
   1
10. Host:
    ein.vistair.com
11. Origin:
    https://ein.vistair.com
12. Referer:
    https://ein.vistair.com/cgi/index.cgi
13. User-Agent:
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.48 Safari/537.36

1. Request Payload
1. ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="state" 5 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="blank" 0 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="aircraftType" A320 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="airport" 5 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="print" sf-1204 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="print" sf-1206 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="print" sf-1015 ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="action_print" Open Selected Information ------WebKitFormBoundaryy0aDN3TK2YELUZ09--

1. Response Headersview source
1. Cache-Control:
   must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
2. Connection:
   Keep-Alive
3. Content-disposition:
   attachment;filename=output.pdf
4. Content-Type:
   application/pdf
5. Date:
   Thu, 14 Nov 2013 13:01:45 GMT
6. Keep-Alive:
   timeout=5, max=100
7. Pragma:
   public
8. Server:
   Apache
9. Transfer-Encoding:
   chunked

In my class I have attempted to recreate this using the following code:

        $request = $this->client->post(

            'https://DOMAINNAMECHANGED.com/cgi/index.cgi',

            array('Content-Type'=>'multipart/form-data'),

            array(

                'state' => 5,

                'blank' => 1,

                'aircraftType' => 'A320,

                'airport' => $airport,

                'print' =>'sf-1204',

                'print' =>'sf-1206',

                'print' =>'sf-1015',

                'action_print' => 'Open Selected Information'

            )

        );

        $response = $request->send()->getBody(true);

This actually works - in that I do get a response back (pdf file) but the major problem is that due to the fact there are 3 "print" variables to be sent (sf-204, sf-1206, sf-1015) - you obviously can't have 3 "print" keys in an array, so only one is sent to the server.

Just how can I create the multipart/form-data message body on my request in the same way that the browser can do. I'm a little lost and need a push in the right direction!

Thanks for any help!