# HTTP Upload with Quixote

Starting with Quixote 0.5.1, Quixote has a new mechanism for handling HTTP upload requests. The bad news is that Quixote applications that already handle file uploads will have to change; the good news is that the new way is much simpler, saner, and more efficient.

As (vaguely) specified by RFC 1867, HTTP upload requests are implemented by transmitting requests with a Content-Type header of `multipart/form-data`. (Normal HTTP form-processing requests have a Content-Type of `application/x-www-form-urlencoded`.) Since this type of request is generally only used for file uploads, Quixote 0.5.1 introduced a new class for dealing with it: HTTPUploadRequest, a subclass of HTTPRequest.

# Upload Form

Here's how it works: first, you create a form that will be encoded according to RFC 1867, ie. with `multipart/form-data`. You can put any ordinary form elements there, but for a file upload to take place, you need to supply at least one `file` form element. Here's an example:

    def upload_form [html] (request):
        '''
        <form enctype="multipart/form-data"
              method="POST"
              action="receive">
          Your name:<br>
          <input type="text" name="name"><br>
          File to upload:<br>
          <input type="file" name="upload"><br>
          <input type="submit" value="Upload">
        </form>
        '''

(You can use Quixote's widget classes to construct the non-`file` form elements, but the Form class currently doesn't know about the `enctype` attribute, so it's not much use here. Also, you can supply multiple `file` widgets to upload multiple files simultaneously.)

The user fills out this form as usual; most browsers let the user either enter a filename or select a file from a dialog box. But when the form is submitted, the browser creates an HTTP request that is different from other HTTP requests in two ways:

- it's encoded according to RFC 1867, i.e. as a MIME message where each sub-part is one form variable (this is irrelevant to you -- Quixote's HTTPUploadRequest takes care of the details)
- it's arbitrarily large -- even for very large and complicated HTML forms, the HTTP request is usually no more than a few hundred bytes. With file upload, the uploaded file is included right in the request, so the HTTP request is as large as the upload, plus a bit of overhead.

# How Quixote Handles the Upload Request

When Quixote sees an HTTP request with a Content-Type of `multipart/form-data`, it creates an HTTPUploadRequest object instead of the usual HTTPRequest. (This happens even if there's not an uploaded file in the request -- Quixote doesn't know this when the request object is created, and `multipart/form-data` requests are oddballs that are better handled by a completely separate class, whether they actually include an upload or not.) This is the `request` object that will be passed to your form-handling function or template, eg.

    def receive [html] (request):
        print request

should print an HTTPUploadRequest object to the debug log, assuming that `receive()` is being invoked as a result of the above form.

However, since upload requests can be arbitrarily large, it might be some time before Quixote actually calls `receive()`. And Quixote has to interact with the real world in a number of ways in order to parse the request, so there are a number of opportunities for things to go wrong. In particular, whenever Quixote sees a file upload variable in the request, it:

- checks that the `UPLOAD_DIR` configuration variable was defined. If not, it raises ConfigError.
- ensures that `UPLOAD_DIR` exists, and creates it if not. (It's created with the mode specified by `UPLOAD_DIR_MODE`, which defaults to `0755`. I have no idea what this should be on Windows.) If this fails, your application will presumably crash with an OSError.
- opens a temporary file in `UPLOAD_DIR` and write the contents of the uploaded file to it. Either opening or writing could fail with IOError.

Furthermore, if there are any problems parsing the request body -- which could be the result of either a broken/malicious client or of a bug in HTTPUploadRequest -- then Quixote raises RequestError.

These errors are treated the same as any other exception Quixote encounters: RequestError (which is a subclass of PublishError) is transformed into a "400 Invalid request" HTTP response, and the others become some form of "internal server error" response, with traceback optionally shown to the user, emailed to you, etc.

# Processing the Upload Request

If Quixote successfully parses the upload request, then it passes a `request` object to some function or PTL template that you supply, as usual. Of course, that `request` object will be an instance of HTTPUploadRequest rather than HTTPRequest, but that doesn't make much difference to you. You can access form variables, cookies, etc. just as you usually do. The only difference is that form variables associated with uploaded files are represented as Upload objects. Here's an example that goes with the above upload form:

    def receive [html] (request):
        name = request.form.get("name")
        if name:
            "<p>Thanks, %s!</p>\n" % name

        upload = request.form.get("upload")
        size = os.stat(upload.tmp_filename)[stat.ST_SIZE]
        if not upload.base_filename or size == 0:
            "<p>You appear not to have uploaded anything.</p>\n"
        else:
            '''\
            <p>You just uploaded <code>%s</code> (%d bytes)<br>
            which is temporarily stored in <code>%s</code>.</p>
            ''' % (upload.base_filename, size, upload.tmp_filename)

Upload objects provide three attributes of interest:

`orig_filename`
  the complete filename supplied by the user-agent in the request that uploaded this file. Depending on the browser, this might have the complete path of the original file on the client system, in the client system's syntax -- eg. `C:\foo\bar\upload_this` or `/foo/bar/upload_this` or `foo:bar:upload_this`.
`base_filename`
  the base component of orig_filename, shorn of MS-DOS, Mac OS, and Unix path components and with "unsafe" characters replaced with underscores. (The "safe" characters are `A-Z`, `a-z`, `0-9`, `- @ & + = _ .`, and space. Thus, this is "safe" in the sense that it's OK to create a filename with any of those characters on Unix, Mac OS, and Windows, not in the sense that you can use the filename in an HTML document without quoting it!)
`tmp_filename`
  where you'll actually find the file on the current system

Thus, you could open the file directly using `tmp_filename`, or move it to a permanent location using `tmp_filename` and `base_filename` -- whatever.

# Upload Demo

The above upload form and form-processor are available, in a slightly different form, in `demo/upload.cgi`. Install that file to your usual `cgi-bin` directory and play around.

$Id: upload.txt 20217 2003-01-16 20:51:53Z akuchlin $