Posting a File and Associated Data to a RESTful WebService preferably as JSON

Question

This is probably going to be a stupid question but I\'m having one of those nights. In an application I am developing RESTful API and we want the client to send data as JSON

Answer 1

I know that this thread is quite old, however, I am missing here one option. If you have metadata (in any format) that you want to send along with the data to upload, you can make a single multipart/related request.

The Multipart/Related media type is intended for compound objects consisting of several inter-related body parts.

You can check RFC 2387 specification for more in-depth details.

Basically each part of such a request can have content with different type and all parts are somehow related (e.g. an image and it metadata). The parts are identified by a boundary string, and the final boundary string is followed by two hyphens.

Example:

POST /upload HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hostname.com
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary=xyz
Content-Length: [actual-content-length]

--xyz
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

{
    "name": "Sample image",
    "desc": "...",
    ...
}

--xyz
Content-Type: image/jpeg

[image data]
[image data]
[image data]
...
--foo_bar_baz--