Send Data by Using a POST Method

You can send files and binary data directly to Media Server using a POST request. One possible way to send a POST request over a socket to Media Server is using the cURL command-line tool.

The data that you send in a POST request must adhere to specific formatting requirements. You can send only the following content types in a POST request to Media Server:

Application/x-www-form-urlencoded

The application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type describes form data that is sent in a single block in the HTTP message body. Unlike the query part of the URL in a GET request, the length of the data is unrestricted. However, Media Server rejects requests that exceed the size specified by the configuration parameter MaxFileUploadSize.

This content type is inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters, and does not allow you to upload files. For these purposes, Micro Focus recommends sending data as multipart/form-data (see Multipart/form-data).

Example

The following example base-64 encodes the file image.jpg into a file imagedata.dat and sends it (using cURL) as application/x-www-form-urlencoded data to Media Server located on the localhost, using port 14000. The example action adds the image to a new face in an existing face database named politicians.

Base-64 encode the image.
- On Windows, create a Powershell script called base64encode.ps1 that contains the following:
```
Param([String]$path)
[convert]::ToBase64String((get-content $path -encoding byte))
```
  Then from the command line, run the script using Powershell:
```
powershell.exe base64encode.ps1 image.jpg > imagedata.dat
```
- On Linux:
```
base64 -w 0 image.jpg > imagedata.dat
```

Send the request to Media Server:

curl http://localhost:14000
   -d 'action=TrainFace&database=politicians&identifier=president'
   --data-urlencode imagedata@imagedata.dat

You can send multiple images in a single request by separating the binary data for each image by a comma (in imagedata.dat).

Multipart/form-data

In the multipart/form-data content type, the HTTP message body is divided into parts, each containing a discrete section of data.

Each message part requires a header containing information about the data in the part. Each part can contain a different content type; for example, text/plain, image/png, image/gif, or multipart/mixed. If a parameter specifies multiple files, you must specify the multipart/mixed content type in the part header.

Encoding is optional for each message part. The message part header must specify any encoding other than the default (7BIT).

Multipart/form-data is ideal for sending non-ASCII or binary data, and is the only content type that allows you to upload files. For more information about form data, see http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html.

NOTE:

In cURL, you specify each message part using the -F (or --form) option. To upload a file in a message part, prefix the file name with the @ symbol. For more information on cURL syntax, see the cURL documentation.

The following example sends image.jpg (using cURL) as multipart/form-data to Media Server located on the localhost, using port 14000. The example action adds the image to a new face in an existing face database named politicians.