How to set a Header field on POST a form?

Question

How can I set a custom field in POST header on submit a form?

Answer 1

It cannot be done - AFAIK.

However you may use for example jquery (although you can do it with plain javascript) to serialize the form and send (using AJAX) while adding your custom header.

Look at the jquery serialize which changes an HTML FORM into form-url-encoded values ready for POST.

UPDATE

My suggestion is to include either

• a hidden form element
• a query string parameter

Answer 2

Set a cookie value on the page, and then read it back server side.

You won't be able to set a specific header, but the value will be accessible in the headers section and not the content body.

Answer 3

From FormData documention:

XMLHttpRequest Level 2 adds support for the new FormData interface. FormData objects provide a way to easily construct a set of key/value pairs representing form fields and their values, which can then be easily sent using the XMLHttpRequest send() method.

With an XMLHttpRequest you can set the custom headers and then do the POST.

Answer 4

In fact a better way to do it to save a cookie on the client side. Then the cookie is automatically sent with every page header for that particular domain. for example, in node-js, you can set a cookie this way:

res.cookie('token', "xyz....", { httpOnly: true });

Now you can access this :

app.get('/',function(req, res){
 var token = req.cookies.token
});

Note that httpOnly:true ensures that the cookie is usually not accessible manually or through javascript and only browser can access it. If you want to send some headers or security tokens with a form post, and not through ajax, in most situation this can be considered a secure way. Although make sure that the data is sent over secure protocol /ssl if you are storing some sensitive user related info which is usually the case.

Answer 5

Here is what I did in pub/jade

extends layout
block content
    script(src="/jquery/dist/jquery.js")
    script.
      function doThePost() {
        var jqXHR = $.ajax({ 
            type:'post'
            , url:<blabla>
            , headers: { 
                'x-custom1': 'blabla'
                , 'x-custom2': 'blabla'
                , 'content-type': 'application/json'
            }
            , data: {
                'id': 123456, blabla
            }
        })
        .done(function(data, status, req) { console.log("done", data, status, req); })
        .fail(function(req, status, err) { console.log("fail", req, status, err); });
      }
    h1= title
    button(onclick='doThePost()') Click

Answer 6

You could use $.ajax to avoid the natural behaviour of <form method="POST">. You could, for example, add an event to the submission button and treat the POST request as AJAX.