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My name is Sagar Ganatra and I'm from Bangalore, India. I'm currently employed with Adobe India and I work there as a ColdFusion Engineer. At Adobe, I have worked on various features of ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder. I'm very much passionate of web technologies and have a very good understanding of jQuery, Flex, HTML5, Java and of course ColdFusion. Sagar H is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 28 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

How to in HTML5: Use the FormData object in XHR2

10.17.2011
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The other day I had posted on uploading a file using XmlHttpRequest 2 and tracking the progress of the file upload process using the progress event on XHR2 object and the progress tag. Another enhancement added to the XHR2 specification is the introduction of FormData object. Using the FormData object, one can create a set of key-value pairs and send them as form data in a XHR request. The FormData object is passed in the send() method of the XHR object:

 var formObject = new FormData();  
 formObject.append("element_1","Sagar");  
 formObject.append("element_2","Ganatra");  
   
 var xhrObject = new XMLHttpRequest();  
 xhrObject.open("POST","postform.cfm");  
 xhrObject.send(formObject);  
This means that, one need not add the form element to the document and can avoid using hidden input element (type="hidden") to send the additional key-value data to the server for processing.

It is also possible to add additional data to an already existing form in the document and send the form data to the server: 

 var docFormElement = document.getElementById('myForm');  
 var docFormData = new FormData(docFormElement);  
 docFormData.append("product_license","Enterprise");
 var xhrObject = new XMLHttpRequest();  
 xhrObject.open("POST","postform.cfm");  
 xhrObject.send(docFormData);

 <form id="myForm">  
   <input name="product_name" type="text" value="ColdFusion" />  
   <input name="product_codename" type="text" value="Zeus" />  
 </form>  

The FormData constructor takes the form element as an argument and then the append function is used to add another key-value data to the FormData object.
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Published at DZone with permission of Sagar H Ganatra, author and DZone MVB. (source)

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