Fetch API and FormData in HTML world

Arun Rajeevan
2 min readJan 2, 2019

Fetch API:
Provides a JavaScript interface for accessing and manipulating parts of the HTTP pipeline, such as requests and responses. It also provides a global fetch() method that provides an easy, logical way to fetch resources asynchronously across the network.
This kind of functionality was previously achieved using XMLHttpRequest. Fetch provides a better alternative that can be easily used by other technologies such as Service Workers. Fetch also provides a single logical place to define other HTTP-related concepts such as CORS and extensions to HTTP.

The fetch specification differs from jQuery.ajax() in two main ways:

  • The Promise returned from fetch() won’t reject on HTTP error status even if the response is an HTTP 404 or 500. Instead, it will resolve normally (with ok status set to false), and it will only reject on network failure or if anything prevented the request from completing.
  • By default,fetch() won't send or receive any cookies from the server, resulting in unauthenticated requests if the site relies on maintaining a user session (to send cookies, the credentials init option must be set).

GET Request

//Simple GET Request
fetch('http://example.com/movies.json')
.then(function(response) {
return response.json();
})
.then(function(myJson) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(myJson));
});

//Note: response.json()returns a Promise.

POST request

//POST Request with body and optionspostData(`http://example.com/answer`, {answer: 42})
.then(data => console.log(JSON.stringify(data)))
.catch(error => console.error(error));

function postData(url = ``, data = {}) {
return fetch(url, {
method: "POST",
mode: "cors",
cache: "no-cache",
credentials: "same-origin",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
redirect: "follow",
referrer: "no-referrer",
body: JSON.stringify(data)
})
.then(response => response.json()); // parses response to JSON
}

Sending a request with credentials included
To cause browsers to send a request with credentials included, even for a cross-origin call, add credentials: 'include' to the init object you pass to the fetch() method.

fetch('https://example.com', {
credentials: 'include'
})

Uploading JSON data

var url = 'https://example.com/profile';
var data = {username: 'example'};
fetch(url, {
method: 'POST', // or 'PUT'
body: JSON.stringify(data), // data can be `string` or {object}!
headers:{
'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}
}).then(res => res.json())
.then(response => console.log('Success:', JSON.stringify(response)))
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));
  • FormData API:
    Provides a JavaScript interface to easily construct a set of key/value pairs representing form fields and their values, which can then be easily sent using ajax. It uses the same format a form would use if the encoding type were set to “multipart/form-data".
var formData = new FormData();
var fileField = document.querySelector("input[type='file']");

formData.append('username', 'abc123');
formData.append('avatar', fileField.files[0]);

fetch('https://example.com/profile/avatar', {
method: 'PUT',
body: formData
})
.then(response => response.json())
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error))
.then(response => console.log('Success:', JSON.stringify(response)))

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