How can I make a multipart/form-data POST request

Question

In the days of version 3.x of Apache Commons HttpClient, making a multipart/form-data POST request was possible (an example from 2004). Unfortunately this is no longer possible in version 4.0 of HttpClient.

For our core activity "HTTP", multipart is somewhat out of scope. We'd love to use multipart code maintained by some other project for which it is in scope, but I'm not aware of any. We tried to move the multipart code to commons-codec a few years ago, but I didn't take off there. Oleg recently mentioned another project that has multipart parsing code and might be interested in our multipart formatting code. I don't know the current status on that. (http://www.nabble.com/multipart-form-data-in-4.0-td14224819.html)

Is anybody aware of any Java library that allows me to write an HTTP client that can make a multipart/form-data POST request?

Background: I want to use the Remote API of Zoho Writer.

Answer 1

We use HttpClient 4.x to make multipart file post.

UPDATE: As of HttpClient 4.3, some classes have been deprecated. Here is the code with new API:

CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClients.createDefault();
HttpPost uploadFile = new HttpPost("...");
MultipartEntityBuilder builder = MultipartEntityBuilder.create();
builder.addTextBody("field1", "yes", ContentType.TEXT_PLAIN);

// This attaches the file to the POST:
File f = new File("[/path/to/upload]");
builder.addBinaryBody(
    "file",
    new FileInputStream(f),
    ContentType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM,
    f.getName()
);

HttpEntity multipart = builder.build();
uploadFile.setEntity(multipart);
CloseableHttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(uploadFile);
HttpEntity responseEntity = response.getEntity();

Below is the original snippet of code with deprecated HttpClient 4.0 API:

HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url);

FileBody bin = new FileBody(new File(fileName));
StringBody comment = new StringBody("Filename: " + fileName);

MultipartEntity reqEntity = new MultipartEntity();
reqEntity.addPart("bin", bin);
reqEntity.addPart("comment", comment);
httppost.setEntity(reqEntity);

HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
HttpEntity resEntity = response.getEntity();

Answer 2

If size of the JARs matters (e.g. in case of applet), one can also directly use httpmime with java.net.HttpURLConnection instead of HttpClient.

httpclient-4.2.4:      423KB
httpmime-4.2.4:         26KB
httpcore-4.2.4:        222KB
commons-codec-1.6:     228KB
commons-logging-1.1.1:  60KB
Sum:                   959KB

httpmime-4.2.4:         26KB
httpcore-4.2.4:        222KB
Sum:                   248KB

Code:

HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setDoOutput(true);
connection.setRequestMethod("POST");

FileBody fileBody = new FileBody(new File(fileName));
MultipartEntity multipartEntity = new MultipartEntity(HttpMultipartMode.STRICT);
multipartEntity.addPart("file", fileBody);

connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", multipartEntity.getContentType().getValue());
OutputStream out = connection.getOutputStream();
try {
    multipartEntity.writeTo(out);
} finally {
    out.close();
}
int status = connection.getResponseCode();
...

Dependency in pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
    <artifactId>httpmime</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.4</version>
</dependency>

Answer 3

I found this sample in Apache's Quickstart Guide. It's for version 4.5:

/**
 * Example how to use multipart/form encoded POST request.
 */
public class ClientMultipartFormPost {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        if (args.length != 1)  {
            System.out.println("File path not given");
            System.exit(1);
        }
        CloseableHttpClient httpclient = HttpClients.createDefault();
        try {
            HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://localhost:8080" +
                    "/servlets-examples/servlet/RequestInfoExample");

            FileBody bin = new FileBody(new File(args[0]));
            StringBody comment = new StringBody("A binary file of some kind", ContentType.TEXT_PLAIN);

            HttpEntity reqEntity = MultipartEntityBuilder.create()
                    .addPart("bin", bin)
                    .addPart("comment", comment)
                    .build();


            httppost.setEntity(reqEntity);

            System.out.println("executing request " + httppost.getRequestLine());
            CloseableHttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
            try {
                System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
                System.out.println(response.getStatusLine());
                HttpEntity resEntity = response.getEntity();
                if (resEntity != null) {
                    System.out.println("Response content length: " + resEntity.getContentLength());
                }
                EntityUtils.consume(resEntity);
            } finally {
                response.close();
            }
        } finally {
            httpclient.close();
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

Use this code to upload images or any other files to the server using post in multipart.

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;

import org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.ResponseHandler;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.MultipartEntity;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.content.FileBody;
import org.apache.http.entity.mime.content.StringBody;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;

public class SimplePostRequestTest {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws UnsupportedEncodingException, IOException {
        HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://192.168.0.102/uploadtest/upload_photo");

        try {
            FileBody bin = new FileBody(new File("/home/ubuntu/cd.png"));
            StringBody id = new StringBody("3");
            MultipartEntity reqEntity = new MultipartEntity();
            reqEntity.addPart("upload_image", bin);
            reqEntity.addPart("id", id);
            reqEntity.addPart("image_title", new StringBody("CoolPic"));

            httppost.setEntity(reqEntity);
            System.out.println("Requesting : " + httppost.getRequestLine());
            ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
            String responseBody = httpclient.execute(httppost, responseHandler);
            System.out.println("responseBody : " + responseBody);

        } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {

        } finally {
            httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
        }
    }

}

it requires below files to upload.

libraries are httpclient-4.1.2.jar, httpcore-4.1.2.jar, httpmime-4.1.2.jar, httpclient-cache-4.1.2.jar, commons-codec.jar and commons-logging-1.1.1.jar to be in classpath.

Answer 5

You can also use REST Assured which builds on HTTP Client. It's very simple:

given().multiPart(new File("/somedir/file.bin")).when().post("/fileUpload");

Answer 6

httpcomponents-client-4.0.1 worked for me. However, I had to add the external jar apache-mime4j-0.6.jar (org.apache.james.mime4j) otherwise reqEntity.addPart("bin", bin); would not compile. Now it's working like charm.