I recently had to access a web API through C Sharp that required a file upload. This is pretty easy if you have an HTML page with a form tag and you want a user to directly upload the file.
<form method="POST" action="http://localhost/" enctype="multipart/form-data">
File : <input type="file" name="content" size="38" /><br />
<input type="hidden" name="id" value='fileUpload' />
</form>
However, this is not always a reasonable path to take. Sometimes you may be wanting to access a file that is already in a system and you don’t want a new upload. If you are accessing an external API, this is probably always the case. Unfortunately, building this post using C# is not quite as straightforward. I first tried using the WebClient UploadFile method, but it didn’t fit my needs because I wanted to upload form values (id, filename, other API specific parameters) in addition to just a file.
So, I needed to roll my own form post. Here is the Multipart Form RFC and the W3C Specification for multipart/form data. After reading these links and searching some forums, here is what I came up with.
Note: If anyone is interested in this code in Visual Basic, reader Mike Ferreira converted the code into VB.Net in a comment below.
public static class FormUpload
{
private static readonly Encoding encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
public static HttpWebResponse MultipartFormDataPost(string postUrl, string userAgent, Dictionary<string, object> postParameters)
{
string formDataBoundary = "-----------------------------28947758029299";
string contentType = "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + formDataBoundary;
byte[] formData = GetMultipartFormData(postParameters, formDataBoundary);
return PostForm(postUrl, userAgent, contentType, formData);
}
private static HttpWebResponse PostForm(string postUrl, string userAgent, string contentType, byte[] formData)
{
HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(postUrl) as HttpWebRequest;
if (request == null)
{
throw new NullReferenceException("request is not a http request");
}
// Set up the request properties
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = contentType;
request.UserAgent = userAgent;
request.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
request.ContentLength = formData.Length; // We need to count how many bytes we're sending.
using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
// Push it out there
requestStream.Write(formData, 0, formData.Length);
requestStream.Close();
}
return request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;
}
private static byte[] GetMultipartFormData(Dictionary<string, object> postParameters, string boundary)
{
Stream formDataStream = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
foreach (var param in postParameters)
{
if (param.Value is FileParameter)
{
FileParameter fileToUpload = (FileParameter)param.Value;
// Add just the first part of this param, since we will write the file data directly to the Stream
string header = string.Format("--{0}\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name=\"{1}\"; filename=\"{2}\";\r\nContent-Type: {3}\r\n\r\n",
boundary,
param.Key,
fileToUpload.FileName ?? param.Key,
fileToUpload.ContentType ?? "application/octet-stream");
formDataStream.Write(encoding.GetBytes(header), 0, header.Length);
// Write the file data directly to the Stream, rather than serializing it to a string.
formDataStream.Write(fileToUpload.File, 0, fileToUpload.File.Length);
}
else
{
string postData = string.Format("--{0}\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name=\"{1}\"\r\n\r\n{2}\r\n",
boundary,
param.Key,
param.Value);
formDataStream.Write(encoding.GetBytes(postData), 0, postData.Length);
}
}
// Add the end of the request
string footer = "\r\n--" + boundary + "--\r\n";
formDataStream.Write(encoding.GetBytes(footer), 0, footer.Length);
// Dump the Stream into a byte[]
formDataStream.Position = 0;
byte[] formData = new byte[formDataStream.Length];
formDataStream.Read(formData, 0, formData.Length);
formDataStream.Close();
return formData;
}
public class FileParameter
{
public byte[] File { get; set; }
public string FileName { get; set; }
public string ContentType { get; set; }
public FileParameter(byte[] file) : this(file, null) { }
public FileParameter(byte[] file, string filename) : this(file, filename, null) { }
public FileParameter(byte[] file, string filename, string contenttype)
{
File = file;
FileName = filename;
ContentType = contenttype;
}
}
}Here is the code to call the MultipartFormDataPost function with multiple parameters, including a file.
// Read file data
FileStream fs = new FileStream("c:\\people.doc", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
byte[] data = new byte[fs.Length];
fs.Read(data, 0, data.Length);
fs.Close();
// Generate post objects
Dictionary<string, object> postParameters = new Dictionary<string, object>();
postParameters.Add("filename", "People.doc");
postParameters.Add("fileformat", "doc");
postParameters.Add("file", new FormUpload.FileParameter(data, "People.doc", "application/msword"));
// Create request and receive response
string postURL = "http://localhost";
string userAgent = "Someone";
HttpWebResponse webResponse = FormUpload.MultipartFormDataPost(postURL, userAgent, postParameters);
// Process response
StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream());
string fullResponse = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
webResponse.Close();
Response.Write(fullResponse);Hopefully this code can help someone, figuring out exactly where to place the boundary and newlines in between form key-value pairs caused a little bit of grief during development. This is some functionality that would be really nice inside of the language library, but it seems like in most languages this is something you end up coding yourself.