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On server side (RESTful server) what criteria should be the main to decide how to read input arguments, data?

Accept or Content-Type

If 'client' (JS) sends to my RESTful service POST request and data (what should be saved) encoded as usual form data, what kind of header he should use to help me how to read his data and what kind of answer send to him back ?

user1016265
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Content-Type

Content-Type specifies the media type of the underlying data.
....
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a
Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If
and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the
recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its
content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the
resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD
treat it as type "application/octet-stream".

If the client sends HTML Form data then proper request content-type header is application/x-www-url-form-encoded or multipart/form-data. It depends on enctype attribute of HTML form.

Accept

 The Accept request-header field can be used to specify certain media
 types which are acceptable for the response.

So definitively server uses Content-Type request header to decide what is the representation of incoming request body and Accept request header to decide what representation to send back to client as response body. Note that response should contain Content-Type header too, but it denotes just representation of response body that has been chosen.

see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616

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Filip
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  • To figure out where (and how) to read incoming data I should look for content-type, and to know in what way generate output I should take a look into Accept header, right ? – user1016265 Apr 12 '13 at 12:53
  • @user1016265: yes, exactly! – Filip Apr 12 '13 at 12:56