Parsing multipart/mixed responses in jQuery

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Parsing multipart/mixed responses in jQuery

Good day.

I'm new to jQuery, and have a passing familiarity with javascript, having spent most of my time on the server side.

My interest is in posting in the browser a multipart/form-data form object consisting of one text field and one file. In response, the server returns a multipart/mixed response consisting of one part html or json, and one part application/octet-stream.

My goal is to learn how to extract with jQuery the html or json part and optionally display it in a target div (if html) or redirect to a URL in the json (if json), and save the octet-stream to disk. Preferably in that order.

Would someone be kind enough to comment on whether such multipart/mixed response parsing is possible with jQuery and some idea of how to do this.

Actually, while I much prefer jQuery, I'll learn something from answers framed in any popular javascript framework, and even unadorned javascript itself.

Thank you.

Have a look at the jQuery's API. If your AJAX call returns HTML you can use the .load function. If it returns JSON you can use the .getJSON function.

jerone 2010-09-11 14:32:44

not really what hes asking

prodigitalson 2010-09-11 14:42:27

Thanks. In fact, the server will always return multipart/mixed. For the sake of discussion, we can assume the parts will always be 'text/html' and 'application/octet-stream'.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 14:53:28

GREAT question. Judging by the existence of this plugin im assuming no:

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/mpAjax

I also found this link in a discussion of that plugin, which might be helpful to you:

http://about.digg.com/blog/duistream-and-mxhr

prodigitalson 2010-09-11 14:44:07

Thanks. Yes, I read about this plugin recently. What I could not discern was whether this plugin could be used if I include an entry for 'application/octet-stream' or not. I did a fair amount of googling around for this subject, and it seems not a lot of people are talking about parsing multipart responses. I can understand why, but would have expected more discussion (and use cases) than I actually found.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 14:50:15

Yeah... ive been doing php/js/html/css development for YEARS and id never even thought of a multi-part response until I saw a few questions on it here on SO over the past week or two. Interesting stuff though.

prodigitalson 2010-09-11 15:01:59

@ae6rt, assuming you manage to successfully parse the `multipart/mixed` response, what do you intend to do with the `application/octet-stream` part?

Darin Dimitrov 2010-09-11 15:11:46

The multipart/mixed response consists of a slug of html that describes (metadata) the result of the form post. The octet-stream part is actually another file that is the result (data) of the form post.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 15:14:49

OK, but what is the application going to do with the file stream? I am asking this because in your question you mentioned something about saving it on disk. What disk?

Darin Dimitrov 2010-09-11 15:18:35

Sounds like I'm missing something :-) After I have the octet-stream bytes in-hand, my plan was to put up a dialog in the browser asking the user where (to what filename) to save 'the file'.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 15:26:10

Oh, that's just not going to work with AJAX. The Save dialog is invoked only when a Content-Disposition header is sent from the server and the request was not made using AJAX.

Darin Dimitrov 2010-09-11 15:29:11

I see. It is not out of the question to return *only* json (the use case is now no longer one where multipart/mixed is returned, but instead application/json) with a URL to where the resulting file can be retreived from the server with HTTP GET. In which case the treatment of the response just got a whole lot simpler.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 15:37:33

Marking the thread with the most information content.

ae6rt 2010-09-11 16:17:57

ansaurus

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Parsing multipart/mixed responses in jQuery

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