Connect 1.8.0 - multipart support

Connect 1.8.0 is a tiny but substantial release because it adds multipart/form-data support via Felix Geisendörfer’s fantastic multipart parser formidable, it’s great and chances are you’re already using it!

The bodyParser() middleware now unifies multipart, json, and x-www-form-urlencoded parsing, providing the req.body object containing the parsed data. For security purposes the files are placed in a separate object, req.files, however just as accessible. A constant struggle that I’ve seen in the community is the concept of “missing” request data events so this will prevent further confusion. The downside to this is that if you wish to report upload progress, or access files and fields as the request is streamed, you will have to use formidable directly.

Before this addition your use of formidable might look something like the following (with Express):

  app.post('/someform', function(req, res, next){
    var form = new formidable.IncomingForm;
    form.parse(req, function(err, fields, files){
      if (err) return next(err);
      // do something with files.image etc
    });
  });

With the new bodyParser() all you need is:

  app.use(express.bodyParser());

  app.post('/some-form', function(req, res){
    // do something with req.files.image
  })

The middleware takes the same options that are mentioned on formidable’s GitHub repo page, so you can specify things like size limits, retaining extensions, the upload directory etc.

  app.use(express.bodyParser({
    uploadDir: '/tmp/uploads'
  }));

That’s it! but I think this will cover well above the 80% use-case and prevent a lot of headaches that people have with the previous the inconsistencies.