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Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2011 (Minneapolis, MN) with: Angela Buraglia and Dan Short
Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2011 (Minneapolis, MN) with: Angela Buraglia ( @aburaglia ) Dan Short ( @danshort )

Posting File Data Using A Base64 Encoding In ColdFusion

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This was sort of based on an Ask Ben inquiry, so I will include it in this section, but it's not entirely accurate. Someone had asked me about passing a file to a web service and I had suggested that one of the ways to do this was to pass it using a Base64 encoding of the binary data. This would allow the data to be easily defined using XML, which is how many web services function (think SOAP, think XML-RPC). While I am not following SOAP or XML-RPC standards in this quick demo, the ideas stay the same.

There are two players in this game. One entity is the file that reads the file data, encodes it, and submits it to the web service. The other entity is the actual web service file that accepts the data, converts the encoded data back to binary, and writes it to a file.

To demo this, we are going to first read in a JPG file and then post it as XML data using the ColdFusion's CFHttp and CFHttpParam tags:

<!---
	Create the path to the binary file that we want to
	post via a web service.
--->
<cfset strFilePath = ExpandPath( "./cats_in_pajamas.jpg" ) />


<!--- Read in the binary file. --->
<cffile
	action="readbinary"
	file="#strFilePath#"
	variable="objBinaryData"
	/>


<!---
	Create the XML that we are going to post. When posting this
	file, we are going to encode it as base64 text data.
--->
<cfsavecontent variable="strXmlData">
	<cfoutput>

		<file>
			<name>#XmlFormat(
				ListLast( strFilePath, "\/" )
				)#</name>

			<ext>#XmlFormat(
				ListLast( strFilePath, "." )
				)#</ext>

			<!---
				When storing the binary data, we are going to
				pass the file as a Base64 encoding. I am like
				95% sure that this will result in only valid
				XML characters, but I am not completely sure.
			--->
			<base64>#ToBase64(
				objBinaryData
				)#</base64>
		</file>

	</cfoutput>
</cfsavecontent>


<!---
	Build the URL for the "web service" to which we are going
	to post this file data.
--->
<cfset strUrl = (
	GetDirectoryFromPath(
		GetPageContext().GetRequest().GetRequestUrl().ToString()
		) &
	"webservice.cfm"
	) />


<!--- Post the XML data to the "web service" file. --->
<cfhttp
	url="#strUrl#"
	method="post">

	<!--- Post XML data. --->
	<cfhttpparam
		type="xml"
		value="#strXmlData#"
		/>

</cfhttp>

As you can see, when I store the data in the XML string, I am being very careful not to include anything that is NOT XML safe. I am, however, not encoding the Base64 data. That makes me nervous, but I feel like 95% sure that Base64 is inherently XML safe since the Base64 data type is part of the XML-RPC standard as well as the XStandard web services SOAP definition. Once we have our XML string, we are simply posting it to the target URL using the CFHttpParam tag of type XML. Using this tag, the CFHttp request automatically sets the content to be of type text/xml and defines our XML string as the request data content.

Now, on the other side of the submission, we have our web service, which takes the XML post, extracts the Base64 data, converts it back to Binary, and writes it to the file system:

<!--- Grab the content from the request data post. --->
<cfset strContent = Trim( GetHttpRequestData().Content ) />

<!--- Check to see if the content is a valid XML document. --->
<cfif IsXml( strContent )>

	<!---
		Parse the XML data into a ColdFusion Xml
		Document Object.
	--->
	<cfset xmlPost = XmlParse( strContent ) />

	<!---
		Check to see if we have all the XML nodes that we
		need in order to save the file. For our naming
		purposes, all we need is the file extension and
		the base64 data.
	--->
	<cfif (
		StructKeyExists( xmlPost.file, "ext" ) AND
		StructKeyExists( xmlPost.file, "base64" )
		)>

		<!---
			ASSERT: We have the nodes that we need, and for
			this demo, we are just going to assume that the
			data values are valid.
		--->

		<!---
			Create the file name for the target file. We are
			going to use the passed in extension and a UUID.
			Make sure that file name points to the executing
			script directory (ExpandPath()).
		--->
		<cfset strFileName = ExpandPath(
			CreateUUID() & "." &
			xmlPost.file.ext.XmlText
			) />

		<!---
			Grab the base64 file data and convert it to
			binary data.
		--->
		<cfset objBinaryData = ToBinary(
			xmlPost.file.base64.XmlText
			) />


		<!--- Write the binary file data to disk. --->
		<cffile
			action="write"
			file="#strFileName#"
			output="#objBinaryData#"
			/>

	</cfif>

</cfif>

I have not included any real error handling or fail handlers as this is just a demo in a controlled environment. If this were a real web service, I am sure you'd want to have CFTry / CFCatch blocks as well as a return value to indicate success or error messages. A lot of that depends on the type of standards you are using (ex. XML-RPC has a very defined way to return errors).

There's not a whole lot going on here. Really, it's just about knowing how to use and leverage ColdFusion's ToBase64() and ToBinary() methods. If you want to see any more of this, my ColdFusion XStandard Web Services project provides file uploading using a SOAP version of this idea.

Want to use code from this post? Check out the license.

Reader Comments

5 Comments

As a suggestion, you may want to wrap the base64 encoded data in a CDATA block since it's being transmitted in an XML format. Base64 is a great encoding for passing data around over HTTP, but to avoid the stress of the XML parser getting its hands on your data, a CDATA block is always useful.

BTW - Thanks for a great site. I refer a lot of people using CF to your site for advice and tutorials. Keep up the great work!

15,640 Comments

@Elliott,

Perfect! Thanks. I kept trying to find the definition, but all I ever found was that it uses "printable characters", which did not instill 100% confidence.

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Ben Nadel