How to send data in request body with a GET when using jQuery $.ajax()

Question

The service API I am consuming has a given GET method that requires the data be sent in the body of the request.

The data required in the body is a list of id's separated by hypen and could potentially be very large and thus it must be sent in the body otherwise it will likely foobar somewhere in the browsers/proxies/webservers etc chain. Note I don't have control over the service or API so please don't make suggestions to change it.

I am using the following jQuery code however observing the request/response in fiddler I can see that the "data" I am sending is ALWAYS converted and appended to the query string despite me setting the "processData" option to false...

$.ajax({
   url: "htttp://api.com/entity/list($body)",
   type: "GET",
   data: "id1-id2-id3",
   contentType: "text/plain",
   dataType: "json",
   processData: false, // avoid the data being parsed to query string params
   success: onSuccess,
   error: onError
});

Anyone know how I can force the "data" value to be sent in the body of the request? Any assistance is appreciated, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In general, that's not how systems use GET requests. So, it will be hard to get your libraries to play along. In fact, the spec says that "If the request method is a case-sensitive match for GET or HEAD act as if data is null." So, I think you are out of luck unless the browser you are using doesn't respect that part of the spec.

You can probably setup an endpoint on your own server for a POST ajax request, then redirect that in your server code to a GET request with a body.

If you aren't absolutely tied to GET requests with the body being the data, you have two options.

POST with data: This is probably what you want. If you are passing data along, that probably means you are modifying some model or performing some action on the server. These types of actions are typically done with POST requests.

GET with query string data: You can convert your data to query string parameters and pass them along to the server that way.

url: 'somesite.com/models/thing?ids=1,2,3'

Answer 2

we all know generally that for sending the data according to the http standards we generally use POST request. But if you really want to use Get for sending the data in your scenario I would suggest you to use the query-string or query-parameters.

1.GET use of Query string as. {{url}}admin/recordings/some_id

here the some_id is mendatory parameter to send and can be used and req.params.some_id at server side.

2.GET use of query string as{{url}}admin/recordings?durationExact=34&isFavourite=true

here the durationExact ,isFavourite is optional strings to send and can be used and req.query.durationExact and req.query.isFavourite at server side.

3.GET Sending arrays {{url}}admin/recordings/sessions/?os["Windows","Linux","Macintosh"]

and you can access those array values at server side like this

let osValues = JSON.parse(req.query.os);
        if(osValues.length > 0)
        {
            for (let i=0; i<osValues.length; i++)
            {
                console.log(osValues[i])
                //do whatever you want to do here
            }
        }

Answer 3

Just in case somebody ist still coming along this question:

There is a body query object in any request. You do not need to parse it yourself.

E.g. if you want to send an accessToken from a client with GET, you could do it like this:

const request = require('superagent');

request.get(`http://localhost:3000/download?accessToken=${accessToken}`).end((err, res) => {
  if (err) throw new Error(err);
  console.log(res);
});

The server request object then looks like {request: { ... query: { accessToken: abcfed } ... } }