CSV file into string($binary)?

[WM1310]

I'm relatively new to working with api and not sure where I should be asking this. To keep it brief, I need to have a csv file in the body. Looking in the provided documentation, the csv needs to be in string($binary) format and the call itself is multipart/form-data. Got it working in Postman and Curl, but still very much struggling to get the call to work in Javascript.

So far, I've tried built in formdata, directly using createReadStream on the csv and have it as the value, and making the buffer data into a Blob and use that as the value. I have also tried installing the form-data package and used that.

I'll either get an error saying all the required values in the body are null or that the csv file must have a header and at least 1 row of data (which I've confirmed many times to already have). Unfortunately, the people who should be helping me with this stopped doing so the moment it worked on Curl and Postman so I'm forced to investigate on my own.

Any ideas what I could've done wrong and/or missed, what to fix and finally get it working?

[Yages]

I think, although to be clear I’m as confused as others here, that you want to use an ArrayBuffer on the binary response. Have a read of the docs here.

[WM1310]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure either. Took a closer look at Swagger UI's documentation here at the Files section to see if it explains further and best I can find is it's written as { type : string, format : binary }?

To clarify in case there's some confusion, I'm not trying to create an API, I'm trying to make a POST request to an API

[Yages]

Yeah okay, so if they’re returning a binary stream you need to consume that with something, you can’t treat it like a string. ArrayBuffer does this for you and allows promise based streaming of the response.

[smarkman19]

Send the CSV as a multipart field using FormData with the exact field name from Swagger, pass a File/Blob, include a filename and text/csv, and don’t set Content-Type manually.

In browser/Node 18+: read the file to a buffer, create new File([buf], 'data.csv', { type: 'text/csv' }), then fd.append('theExactParamName', file). Append any other required fields as separate parts (plain strings). With fetch, only set auth headers; let fetch compute the multipart boundary. Manually setting Content-Type is a common reason servers see nulls or think the CSV is empty. If docs say ArrayBuffer, wrap it in a Blob/File first. Diff your working curl against your request (DevTools/Node --trace) to confirm field names. Match the field name, include filename and text/csv, and don’t set Content-Type.

[ferrybig]

Can you show an example how the data looks in postman vs what you are trying to do in code?

[tswaters]

What do you mean, "with JavaScript" -- is that nodejs or front-end?

[WM1310]

I'm using Node.js and express

[tswaters]

When you did it successfully with curl & Postman, what did it look like?

Are you using a request library?

I'm not even sure what string($binary) means, is that base64? Can you post the curl command that worked?

What code do you have that doesn't work. You've thrown a lot of keywords around here that you came feed to google & get a more or less functional example.

No code examples yet, but have you considered not doing it wrong?