Setting Form EncType Dynamically To Multipart/Form-Data In IE (Internet Explorer)

Posted June 27, 2008 at 10:07 AM by Ben Nadel

Tags: Javascript / DHTML

Reader Comments

Does firefox also work with "encoding" rather than just "enctype"? Would save you an extra line :).

@Gareth,

I actually didn't even check that.

The angel in me would prefer to stay with "enctype" as that is what the name of the attribute actually is and therefore what the real "intent" of the attr() function is meant to be.... but if all browsers worked with "encoding", the devil in my might not care ;)

Thanks Ben for documenting this behavior of IE. I was breaking my head for quite sometime to find out why my AJAX file upload is not working in IE.

Regards
Sudar

@Sudar,

Glad to help! Yeah, it was really frustrating coming up against this for the first time.

in opera and firefox also work whit "encoding". Thanks for the tip!

thanks for the tip. this has saved me hours of recoding!

Thank you very much.

Ahh, I really wish this was higher up in Google when search terms are something like "ie dynamically create upload form" or "ie upload form bug", woulda saved me a lot of time. Thanks for documenting this.

@Anon,

Well, I'm glad you made it here eventually, even if a little delayed :)

Thanks, helped one I had the inspiration to google it!

Thanks, now working...

@Mon, @yoyok,

Awesome fellas. Glad to help.

Thanks for the useful post, save me lots of time.

The right-and-strict implementation should be:

$('form#upload-form').attr((this.encoding ? 'encoding' : 'enctype') , 'multipart/form-data');

Cheers!

@Emanuele,

Good point, that is probably technically more accurate as it only applies attributes when necessary.

YEE HAWW!! This post saved my bacon!!! Thanks!!

@King,

Ha ha, no problem with the bacon :)

Hi Ben, Again, great site. I've got another question for you. I'm trying to upload a file from flex via remoteobject with amf.

Now the coldfusion file (actually cfc method) that I'm supposed to work with used to work with a form field, html style; Using <cffile formfield= ... etc. When I'm in flex I have the file as a bytearray, but can change it to other data types if needed (string etc.). Blah Blah, here is the question. Do you know what format coldfusion is looking for when it grabs the form field that holds the reference to the file? I can't seem to find any documentation on this and I need to know it so I can try and get flex to convert to that format first and then send it as a variable to the cfc.

@Josh,

I'm not really versed in FLEX. When a request comes into ColdFusion, I believe it just grabs the byte array of the request body and parses out the multi-part information based on delimiters. But, I don't know much about that, technically.

Great! I was getting mad with this bug!

Ben,

I found out that IE uses 'image/pjpeg' instead of 'image/jpeg'. As a matter of fact, enctype="multipart/form-data" works for ALL browsers for as long as you check for what it returns. IE had to return something else :))

Regards,
Ravi.

Thanks for sharing this. It really helped me in fixing my issue. I was able to find that IE is not sending the file and using wrong Content-Type while posting data. Your post helped me in solving it. Thank you.

Thank you. I am created the form in JavaScript and set EncType in 'multipart/form-data', but Internet Explorer do not understand this property and sended this form with enctype in 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'. Now I've added encoding and everything started working normally.

very helpful, many thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanx

Very helpful ... I had this problem using Eclipse build-in browser but set the encoding property solved the issue ... Thanks a lot

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

I banged my head on this problem for half a week before I stumbled across this little gem...

@Ben Holland,

Ha ha, thanks :) Glad this helped you!

Hi Ben,

In Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702, I faced a problem of access to the property "enctype" of the form.
To solve the problem, I used the following line of code:
$ ('form # upload-form'). get (0). encoding = 'multipart/form-data';

To remove the encoding, use 'text/plain' for example.

Congratulations for this site!
Best regards

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