Question

I have a client that is sending data chunks to my node.js server.

I want to listen on the “end” event and retrieve the accumulated request body.

Here is my code:

app.post('/users', function(req, res){

  req.on('end', function() { // WHY IS THIS NEVER FIRED?
    console.log(req.body);

    res.send({
      "status": "ok"
    });

  });

});

The problem is that the ‘end’ event is never fired.

Anyone knows why?

Also, if I do in this way, will the req.body be the accumulated body of all the body chunks?

Answer 1

Basically http POST only fires when you POST to the server. I can’t be certain, but I’m assuming you are just attempting to visit server:port/users in your web browser and fail to get a response. By default the web browser is GETing the server. To fix this you have two options.

1. If you change app.post to app.get the event will correctly fire when you visit /users

2. Or you can fire the post function using a form. For example the following code will display a form if you visit the page using GET. When you submit the form it will fire POST.

var express = require('express'),
    app = express.createServer();

app.listen(1337, "127.0.0.1");

app.get('/users',function(req,res){
  res.send('<form method="post" action="/users"><input type="submit" value="Submit" /></form>');
})

app.post('/users', function(req, res){
  req.on('end', function() {
    console.log('success');
    res.send('success!!!');
  });
});