Java servlet's request parameter's name set to entire json object

Question

I'm sending a json object through ajax to a java servlet. The json object is key-value type with three keys that point to arrays and a key that points to a single string. I build it in javascript like this:

var jsonObject = {"arrayOne": arrayOne, "arrayTwo": arrayTwo, "arrayThree": arrThree, "string": stringVar};

I then send it to a java servlet using ajax as follows:

httpRequest.open('POST', url, true);  
httpRequest.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");  
httpRequest.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");  
var jsonString = jsonObject.toJSONString();   
httpRequest.send(jsonString);

This will send the string to my servlet, but It isn't showing as I expect it to. The whole json string gets set to the name of one of my request's parameters. So in my servlet if I do request.getParameterNames(); It will return an enumeration with one of the table entries' key's to be the entire object contents. I may be mistaken, but my thought was that it should set each key to a different parameter name. So I should have 4 parameters, arrayOne, arrayTwo, arrayThree, and string. Am I doing something wrong or is my thinking off here? Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Can you use jQuery? Its .ajax and related methods handle all the encoding for you. — Barmar
– Barmar, Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 17:07
I can use jquery, so I'll check those out. I'll probably just do server side parsing though. Thanks. — Geren White
– Geren White, Commented Oct 19, 2012 at 18:04

Alex · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-19 17:06:12Z

1

When you set the content-type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, you're telling the server that the request content is going to be a string of the form "param1=value1&param2=value2...". But your actual content is just a single value; the x-www-form-urlencoded content type has nothing to do with JSON. If you want to pass the request as JSON, you'll need to set the content-type to application/json and then have a JSON parser on the server side to parse it and extract the key/value pairs.

Alternatively, you could keep the x-www-form-urlencoded type, loop through your JSON object and, for every key/value pair, serialize the value as a JSON string and URL-encode, and use that to build up a request string that looks like:

arrayOne=<arrayOne JSON string>&arrayTwo=<arrayTwo JSON String>&...

answered Oct 19, 2012 at 17:06

Alex

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user18428 · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-19 17:08:02Z

1

It is the expected behavior, you're converting your object to string (using toJSONString) and its is being send as a request parameter. You may want to parse the JSON value on the serverside using libraries such as Jackson, Jettison or XStream see http://www.mkyong.com/java/how-to-convert-java-object-to-from-json-jackson/

answered Oct 19, 2012 at 17:08

user18428

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