File upload handling in RESTful Symfony apps

[Stepan Anchugov]

How do you handle file uploads in your APIs?

Imagine we have an endpoint that expects some data and some embedded files (for example, the Twitter's POST statuses/update_with_media).

Twitter's API usually expects JSON, but this exact method expects raw multipart data. It seems like an inconsistency to me. The other way around would be putting the (Base64-)encoded media into the JSON, and it seems pretty ugly too.

Also, we could set up an endpoint that would accept only uploads and give back IDs we could then somehow link to created models (that means we'd have two methods: one for media upload and one for the data).

What's the right way here? And how do we do this with FOSRest?

[evil...@gmail.com]

We just did raw mutipart data.  So, if you wanted to send something without a file, it would accept JSON/XML - but if you wanted to send a file, then multipart with the extra "file" field.

One thing that we did was add our own custom Deserializer that accepts arrays, so we still use the JMS Serializer for decoding even raw POST data (which excludes the file, of course).  So our logic doesn't care what the input format is - it just checks the request to see if it included any files.

The inconsistency bothers me too, still - but I couldn't think of another really practical way.

[Fernando Arconada]

I did it with Base64 encoded in the JSON

[evil...@gmail.com]

I did it with Base64 encoded in the JSON

Got a couple questions if you don't mind:

* How did it turn out?

* Were you sending large files?

* What were the clients of the API?  If they were traditional web browsers, were there cross-platform issues?

[Malachi Soord]

Saw an interesting post about this online which although not Symfony related explains two options that are available.

http://blog.marcinbudny.com/2014/02/sending-binary-data-along-with-rest-api.html#.U7awjPmSy6E

The project I am working on will need to implement image uploads and we are going to handle it via multipart/form-data.

Has anyone tried using BSON with Symfony?

[Bezalel Hermoso]

I have implemented a file upload endpoint which simply accepts the raw multi-part data submitted. We also expect the client to specify a "Content-type" header to the mime-type of the submitted file. So all we had to do was write the raw data to a file and save it with the appropriate extension (using ExtensionGuesser).

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Thanks.


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