I’m sending a POST request via XMLHttpRequest
with data entered into an HTML form. The form without interference of JavaScript would submit its data encoded as application/x-www-form-urlencoded
.
With the XMLHttpRequest, I wanted to send the data with via the FormData
API which does not work since it treats the data as if it were encoded as multipart/form-data
. Therefor I need to write the data as a query string, properly escaped, into the send method of the XMLHttpRequest
.
addEntryForm.addEventListener('submit', function(event) {
// Gather form data
var formData = new FormData(this);
// Array to store the stringified and encoded key-value-pairs.
var parameters = []
for (var pair of formData.entries()) {
parameters.push(
encodeURIComponent(pair[0]) + '=' +
encodeURIComponent(pair[1])
);
}
var httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
httpRequest.open(form.method, form.action);
httpRequest.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
httpRequest.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (httpRequest.readyState === XMLHttpRequest.DONE) {
if (httpRequest.status === 200) {
console.log('Successfully submitted the request');
} else {
console.log('Error while submitting the request');
}
}
};
httpRequest.send(parameters.join('&'));
// Prevent submitting the form via regular request
event.preventDefault();
});
Now this whole thing with the for ... of
loop, etc. seems a bit convoluted. Is there a simpler way to transform FormData
into a query string? Or can I somehow send FormData with a different encoding?
You could use URLSearchParams
const queryString = new URLSearchParams(new FormData(myForm)).toString()