hapi.js - POST and PUT request payloads

[00:00] I have a very simple hapi service set up to run on port 8000, and I've already started it with nodemon. To handle request payloads we need to have a route set up that handles POSTs or PUTs. I'll just add a route and then set a method on an array containing both POST and PUT. For this demonstration, the path can stay as is, and I'll just have the handler echo the request payload. The request payload is where hapi places the content of the request body.

[00:25] Now we'll use HTTPI to make a POST request from my terminal. I'll add fname and lname properties to the request that HTTPI will automatically turn into a JSON payload. The first JSON objects is the request body, and the second is the response body, and they match. If I change the request from a POST to a PUT, the data is handled the same way. If I add the --form option to HTTPI you can see that the request body was URL encoded and the response was output as JSON.

[01:01] Hapi loads the request body into memory and parses it by default for any request that is not a GET or HEAD request, and it will detect and parse a number of different payload MIME types, like JSON and URL encoded forms. If I were to configure the route for the default payload behavior, I'd add a config section to the route containing a payload object. The output property determines how the payload is represented, the default is data. The parse property determines if the payload is processed or presented raw, the default is true.

[01:34] Running the form PUT again shows that the route is behaving the same as before. If I set the parse option to false and make the form PUT request again, the request and the response match because hapi did not parse the URL encoded string into a JSON object. If I decide that I only want support JSON payloads, I would add an allow property and lock it to application/JSON. Now form PUT request results in an unsupported media type error.