Servant.Multipart.API

Combinator for specifying a multipart/form-data request body, typically (but not always) issued from an HTML <form>.

multipart/form-data can't be made into an ordinary content type for now in servant because it doesn't just decode the request body from some format but also performs IO in the case of writing the uploaded files to disk, e.g in /tmp, which is not compatible with servant's vision of a content type as things stand now. This also means that MultipartForm can't be used in conjunction with ReqBody in an endpoint.

The tag type parameter instructs the function to handle data either as data to be saved to temporary storage (Tmp) or saved to memory (Mem).

The a type parameter represents the Haskell type to which you are going to decode the multipart data to, where the multipart data consists in all the usual form inputs along with the files sent along through <input type="file"> fields in the form.

One option provided out of the box by this library is to decode to MultipartData.

Example:

  type API = MultipartForm Tmp (MultipartData Tmp) :> Post '[PlainText] String

  api :: Proxy API
  api = Proxy

  server :: MultipartData Tmp -> Handler String
  server multipartData = return str

    where str = "The form was submitted with "
             ++ show nInputs ++ " textual inputs and "
             ++ show nFiles  ++ " files."
          nInputs = length (inputs multipartData)
          nFiles  = length (files multipartData)
  

You can alternatively provide a FromMultipart instance for some type of yours, allowing you to regroup data into a structured form and potentially selecting a subset of the entire form data that was submitted.

Example, where we only look extract one input, username, and one file, where the corresponding input field's name attribute was set to pic:

  data User = User { username :: Text, pic :: FilePath }

  instance FromMultipart Tmp User where
    fromMultipart multipartData =
      User <$> lookupInput "username" multipartData
           <*> fmap fdPayload (lookupFile "pic" multipartData)

  type API = MultipartForm Tmp User :> Post '[PlainText] String

  server :: User -> Handler String
  server usr = return str

    where str = username usr ++ "'s profile picture"
             ++ " got temporarily uploaded to "
             ++ pic usr ++ " and will be removed from there "
             ++ " after this handler has run."
  

Note that the behavior of this combinator is configurable, by using serveWith from servant-server instead of serve, which takes an additional Context argument. It simply is an heterogeneous list where you can for example store a value of type MultipartOptions that has the configuration that you want, which would then get picked up by servant-multipart.

Important: as mentionned in the example above, the file paths point to temporary files which get removed after your handler has run, if they are still there. It is therefore recommended to move or copy them somewhere in your handler code if you need to keep the content around.

MultipartForm which can be modified with Lenient.

What servant gets out of a multipart/form-data form submission.

The type parameter tag tells if MultipartData is stored as a temporary file or stored in memory. tag is type of either Mem or Tmp.

The inputs field contains a list of textual Inputs, where each input for which a value is provided gets to be in this list, represented by the input name and the input value. See haddocks for Input.

The files field contains a list of files that were sent along with the other inputs in the form. Each file is represented by a value of type FileData which among other things contains the path to the temporary file (to be removed when your handler is done running) with a given uploaded file's content. See haddocks for FileData.

Allows you to tell servant how to turn a more structured type into a MultipartData, which is what is actually sent by the client.

  data User = User { username :: Text, pic :: FilePath }

  instance toMultipart Tmp User where
      toMultipart user = MultipartData [Input "username" $ username user]
                                       [FileData "pic"
                                                 (pic user)
                                                 "image/png"
                                                 (pic user)
                                       ]
  

MultipartData is the type representing multipart/form-data form inputs. Sometimes you may instead want to work with a more structured type of yours that potentially selects only a fraction of the data that was submitted, or just reshapes it to make it easier to work with. The FromMultipart class is exactly what allows you to tell servant how to turn "raw" multipart data into a value of your nicer type.

  data User = User { username :: Text, pic :: FilePath }

  instance FromMultipart Tmp User where
    fromMultipart form =
      User <$> lookupInput "username" (inputs form)
           <*> fmap fdPayload (lookupFile "pic" $ files form)
  

Tag for data stored as a temporary file

Tag for data stored in memory

Representation for a textual input (any <input> type but file).

<input name="foo" value="bar" /> would appear as Input "foo" "bar".

Representation for an uploaded file, usually resulting from picking a local file for an HTML input that looks like <input type="file" name="somefile" />.