Emulating HTTP POST via httpclient 3.x for multi options

Question

I want to emulate a HTTP POST using application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding to send a option group that allows multiple selections.

<select name="groups" multiple="multiple" size="4">
    <option value="2">Administration</option>
    <option value="1">General</option>
</select>

Does adding 2 NameValuePairs (NVP) with the same name work ? My serverside log shows that only the first NVP was received.

e.g

PostMethod method = ...;
NameValuePair[] nvpairs = {
    new NameValuePair( "groups", "2" );
    new NameValuePair( "groups", "1" );
};
method.addParameter( nvpairs );

Only the groups=1 parameter was received. Thanks

Answer 1

More likely is that your server code is calling ServletRequest.getParameter() rather than getParameterValues().

But the best way to verify is use an HTTP proxy such as Fiddler to look at the actual request.

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Edit: the correct HttpClient method is addParameters(), not addParameter() -- your code shows the latter, but I don't believe it would compile so am assuming you copied incorrectly.