CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ionic-frameworkionic2ionic-native
Raúl Bojalil
Raúl Bojalil

Reputation: 570

How to send POST requests with array properties (Ionic 2 HTTP plugin)?

In one of my Ionic 2 projects I need to send a POST request to a server with a JSON body that looks like this:

var body = { "prop" : 1, 
  "prop2" : "Test", 
  "prop3": [{ "id" : "1", "qty": 1, "details": "Test" }] 
}

I am using the following code to call the server using the native HTTP plugin (1.2.0) in Android: 

http.post(url, body, {}).then(function() { ... })

But my server is receiving the following:

{ "prop" : 1, 
  "prop2" : "Test", 
  "prop3": "[{ \"id\" : \"1\", \"qty\": 1, \"details\": \"Test\" }]"
}

As you can see, the array property "prop3" is being turned into a string, so my server is failing to parse it because it's expecting an array, not a string.

One of the things I could do is to change the server side code to parse this string back into an array (but that would be far from ideal). The other thing I could do is to parse the JSON object manually with JSON.stringify.

So, is this just a bug in the plugin or am I missing something here?

Native HTTP plugin

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2692

Answers (2)

Flatout
Flatout

Reputation: 350

Try set http.setDataSerializer("json"); And send data as usual: http.post(url, body, {})

Then http plugin will send data with application/json content type and support deep structure of json, as stated in the documentation: https://github.com/silkimen/cordova-plugin-advanced-http#setdataserializer

Upvotes: 4

Raúl Bojalil
Raúl Bojalil

Reputation: 570

So, after taking a look at the plugin's source code (the Java one, I'm testing my application in Android) it seems that I won't be able to use the plugin as is (I would need to modify it). What I found was this:

In CordovaHttpPost.java, the body of the request is sent as Form data (simple key-values).

request.form(this.getParams());  //Map<?, ?>

That's why my array property is converted into a string (and any other complex object for that matter)

TL;DR this plugin is only useful to send simple JSON key-value objects (no nesting, no complex objects, no arrays, etc.).

Upvotes: 1

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