How do I send a buffer in an HTTP request? - node.js

Question

I have a file in memory (buffer) - there is no file on the file system.
I want to send that buffer to another server that talks HTTP.
For example, some API A creates a file in memory, SignServer manipulates such files, and responds with a new buffer. My API takes the file from A and feeds it to SignServer.
I tried sending the file to SignServer in multiple ways, but it keeps responding with status 400 (missing field 'data' in request).
What I tried:
var http = require('http');
var querystring = require('querystring');
var data = querystring.stringify({
workerName: 'PDFSigner',
data: file_buffer
});
var request = new http.ClientRequest({
hostname: 'localhost',
port: 8080,
path: '/signserver/process',
method: 'GET',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
// I also tried 'multipart/form-data'
'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(data)
}
});
request.end(data);
I tried printing data, and it showed:
workerName=PDFSigner&data=
Which is bad because data wasn't set to file_buffer.
I tried printing file_buffer, and it does have content (not null, not undefined, actually has bytes inside).
So stringifying the buffer gave an empty string.
I tried doing the same thing with the request module and it didn't work either.
Note that SignServer isn't written in Node nor JavaScript. It's a Java application, so it probably doesn't work with json (which is why I'm trying to do it with querystring). Yes, I tried sending json.

Answer 1

The reason why data is set to an empty string is described in this issue and the solution is given in this issue.
escape and stringify the buffer like so:
var data = querystring.stringify({
workerName: 'PDFSigner',
data: escape(file_buffer).toString('binary')
});
As #robertklep mentioned, your other problem is that you can't send a big file using application/x-www-form-urlencoded. You'd need to do it with multipart/form-data.