Specification for multipart/form-data

[Bob van der Linden]

Hi all!

Currently the specification isn't mentioning multipart/form-data explicitly. This leads to some confusion as to how these requests should be encoded in HAR.

The specification here: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/har-12-spec

does mention `multipart/form-data` in an example:

"postData": {

    "mimeType": "multipart/form-data",

    "params": [],

    "text" : "plain posted data",

    "comment": ""

}

Although this raises more questions than answers. Should the boundary be added in the mimetype? Is the `plain posted data` one of the 'parts' of the form-data or just dummy data for the example?

In addition, when Chrome exports HAR for multipart/form-data, it doesn't export the `postData` field at all. So when forms are posted using `application/x-www-form-urlencoded` it does show parameters, but when the form is submitted using multipart/form-data it isn't emitted at all. This too causes quite a bit of confusion. Is it fine for Chrome to leave out the postData like that or does the specification require postData to be there when the request has a request body?

If the specification should become stricter on this topic, where is the best place to do such proposals?

I ran into these issues while working on a CLI tool to generate and manipulate HAR files: https://github.com/bobvanderlinden/harhar

Regards,

Bob van der Linden