Question

I’m building my first node.js site with expressjs.

Part of it is handling notifications from Fitbit to an endpoint on my site, /api/1/fitbit_update, like this one:

POST /api/1/fitbit_update HTTP/1.1
Host: myhost.dk
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=JGUOAeGT3Fjgjcdk6s35F2mPVVyTdzgR
Content-Length: 374
Connection: keep-alive

--JGUOAeGT3Fjgjcdk6s35F2mPVVyTdzgR
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="updates"; filename="update1353963418000.json"
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary

[{"collectionType":"activities","date":"2012-11-26","ownerId":"qw12er23","ownerType":"user","subscriptionId":"112233-activities"}]
--JGUOAeGT3Fjgjcdk6s35F2mPVVyTdzgR--

I need to parse the json object in the body of the HTTP request, but Express cannot help me with that.

Any ideas how to get a hold of the JSON object?

I’ve seen some middleware examples, but I’m not sure how to actually get to the contents with the req.on(‘someevent’) approach.

req.body returns an empty object {}

Answer 1

So this request is a multipart file upload where the file you are interested in is a JSON document. Check out the express multipart example. You will want to do something like:

• read the file that connect has saved for you at req.files.updates.path
• parse that JSON data into an object using JSON.parse