post with form-params and content-type json

I am programming against an internal REST API that requires a POST, with form-params, and content-type json.

I’ve verified that I can connect to the API, login, get cookies, and do other simple things. I have written working code against this API in Python and have access to similar Ruby code.

Here are two tries. One using clj-http (which works) and the other http-kit, which does not.

(defn post-weblink-http-kit [path cookies spot-id url title description]
  @(http-kit/post (str path "spots/" spot-id "/items")
              {:headers {"Cookie" cookies}
               :content-type :json  ; Ignored??
               :form-params {:item {:webLink {:url url :title title :description description}}}}))


(defn post-weblink-clj-http [path cookies spot-id url title description]
  (client/post (str path "spots/" spot-id "/items")
               {:cookies cookies
                :content-type :json
                :form-params {:item {:webLink {:url url :title title :description description}}}}))

(Note, the only real difference here is that the cookies for http-kit are raw and the cookies for clj-http are a map. But I have verified that is not the issue.)

I have also tried explicitly constructing the json (which is what I needed to do in Python).

(defn post-weblink-json [path cookies spot-id url title description]
  @(http-kit/post (str path "spots/" spot-id "/items")
              {:headers {"Cookie" cookies}
               :content-type :json  ; Ignored??
               :form-params {:item (json/generate-string {:webLink {:url url :title title :description description}})}}))

Both http-kit calls give an error like this:

:body “"757: unexpected token at ‘item=%7B%22webLink%22%3A%7B%22url%22%3A%22http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNikola_Tesla%22%2C%22title%22%3A%22Nik+Tesla%22%2C%22description%22%3A%22foo+bar+baz%22%7D%7D’"”

Any thoughts on this??

[pastafari]

Unfortunately, if you pass in form-params, http-kit tries to coerce it as below:

:body      (if form-params (query-string form-params) body))
;;; client.clj Line 72

so even though you constructed json, it tried to coerce it into a url encoded string. The :content-type was ignored as you rightly point out.

The trick is to pass the :body and :headers explicitly as below:

(http/post some-url {:body (json/write-str {"item" "blahblah"})
                                :headers {"Content-Type" "application/json"}})

That said, I agree that the interface of http-kit could be a little friendlier.

[ptaoussanis]

Closing this, thanks for the docs PR!