Fields with brackets ([])

[ghost]

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this, but I had a need to use form fields with names using brackets: field_name[bracket1][bracket2]. (I guess I really don't NEED this, but it sure makes handling on the server side much better organized.)

I wrote a few lines of code that take the formidable fields and breaks them into JSON objects and values. For instance formidable would pass in the above example as a field named fields.'field_name[bracket1][bracket2]', and I need to have that dealt with in the form fields.field_name.bracket1.bracket2

I don't know whether one would expect to find this code in formidable or some other location of the stack, but I have included below the code snippet I created to make this work:

let form = new formidable.IncomingForm();
form.parse(req, (err, fields, files) => {
  // Handle array inputs
  let newFields = {};
  for(let _i1 in fields) {
    let _curLoc = newFields,
         _split = _i1.split('['),
         _splitLength = _split.length - 1;
    for(let _i2 in _split) {
      let _pointer = _split[_i2].replace(']', '');
      if(_i2 == _splitLength) {
        _curLoc[_pointer] = fields[_i1]; 
      } else {
        _curLoc[_pointer] = _curLoc[_pointer] ? _curLoc[_pointer] : {};
      }
      _curLoc = _curLoc[_pointer];
    }
  }
  fields = newFields;
  // do other stuff
}

[tunnckoCore]

What I did in koa-better-body is to collect them as "url" string and pass it to some querystring module.

for example

let qs = require('qs')
let buff = ''

form.on('field', (name, value) => {
  buff += `${name}=${value}&`
})
form.on('end', () => {
  const fields = qs.parse(buff.slice(0, -1))
  console.log(fields)
})

something like that?

I believe it will work because my package have tests for such nested forms - test/urlencoded.js#L60

[badeball]

The problem I see with this, is that there is no standard way of interpreting a non-trivial query string. querystring will emit an array if there are multiple keys with the same value. From the Ruby on Rails-world, I am used to keys postfixed with [] being interpreted as arrays. It really seems highly opinionated to me. Since this is a low-level library, I think it should not be opinionated in terms of this. Rather, I think it should parse and emit the key-value pairs that are found and leave it up to the user of interpreting them.

[tunnckoCore]

@badeball yea, absolutely.

It has workarounds and we shouldn't do something and it's not a job of that package.

[DylanPiercey]

I personally use https://github.com/DylanPiercey/q-set when parsing forms to achieve this effect.
Hope it helps some of you :).

[tunnckoCore]

Hm. Okay, seems like #380 is pretty basic implementation then. I just realized that.

Overall, most of the issues and PRs are about this support - both in fields and files. So we need to think seriously about some good implementation and #380 won't be enough.

[tunnckoCore]

Going to close, in favor of #545 .