Question

We are trying to interact with a RESTful web service that expects a file.

I set the name of the field to data (as required by the API) and then specify the file as an absolute path. When the file makes it to the server, the filename in the HTTP transaction is the complete absolute path.

This causes a problem with the API as the full path is then recorded as the “FileName”.

How do I get ColdFusion to report only the file name rather than the full path?

We are using ColdFusion 9.

Here is the CFML:

<cfhttp url="http://server/testcode"
        port="9876"
        method="post"
        result="Content">

    <cfhttpparam    type="file"
                    name="data"
                    file="c:\temp\testfile.txt">
</cfhttp>

Here are some examples of the HTTP interactions with different browsers:

CFHTTP 9
-------------------------------7d0d117230764
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="data"; filename="c:\temp\testfile.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the text, really long, well, not really.

-------------------------------7d0d117230764--



IE8
-----------------------------7db370d80e0a
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="FileField"; filename="C:\temp\testfile.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the text, really long, well, not really.
-----------------------------7db370d80e0a--


Chrome 13
------WebKitFormBoundaryDnpFVJwCsZkzTGDc
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="FileField"; filename="testfile.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the text, really long, well, not really.

Firefox 6
-----------------------------22798303036224
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="FileField"; filename="testfile.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

This is the text, really long, well, not really.
-----------------------------22798303036224--

Apparently IE8 and CFHTTP both do the same thing (add “c:\temp” to the file name). I’m not sure what the spec for HTTP is, but it would be nice if there was a way to get CFHTTP to leave the path off.

Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

I ran into a problem similar to yours, once. I didn’t care about excluding the path, but I wanted to send a different filename than the name of the file on my server’s filesystem. I could not find a way to do it using CF tags at all, but I was able to get it to work by dropping into Java. I used org.apache.commons.httpclient, which ships with CF9 IIRC. It goes something like this (pardon any typos, I’m transposing from more complicated code):

oach = 'org.apache.commons.httpclient';
oachmm = '#oach#.methods.multipart';
method = createObject('java', '#oach#.methods.PostMethod').init(post_uri);
filePart = createObject('java', '#oachmm#.FilePart').init(
  'fieldname',
  'filename',
  createObject('java', 'java.io.File').init('filepath')
);
method.setRequestEntity(
  createObject('java', '#oachmm#.MultipartRequestEntity').init(
    [ filePart ],
    method.getParams()
  )
);
status = createObject('java', '#oach#.HttpClient').init().executeMethod(method);
method.releaseConnection();