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I've been trying to update Ross-Gill's Twitter API for REBOL2 to support uploading media. From looking at its source, the REBOL cookbook, the codeconscious site, and other questions here, my understanding is that read/custom is the preferred way to POST data to websites.

However, I haven't been able to find any real documentation on read/custom. For example: Does it support sending multipart/form-data? (I've managed to work around this by manually composing each part, but it doesn't seem to work for all image files on Twitter's end and is a bit of a hack). Does read/custom only return text on an HTTP/1.0 200 OK response? (It appears so, which is problematic when I receive HTTP/1.0 202 Accepted and need to read the resulting data). Is there a reason that read/custom/binary doesn't appear to send binary data correctly without converting the data using to-string?

TL;DR: Is there good documentation on REBOL2's read/custom somewhere? Alternatively, is read/custom only meant for basic POSTs and I should be using ports and handling the HTTP responses manually?

Tectorum
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You guessed right, read/custom is meant for simple HTTP posts, handling web forms data only (that is why it will fail on binary data). No official documentation for it. But that is not an issue as you can access the source code of the HTTP implementation:

probe system/schemes/HTTP

There you can see that /custom refinement supports two keywords, post and header (for setting custom HTTP headers). It also appears that even if you use both keywords, Content-Type will be forced to application/x-www-form-urlencoded no matter what (which is probably the reason why your binary data gets rejected by the server, as the provided mime type is wrong).

In order to work around that, you can save the HTTP object, modify its implementation to fit your needs and reload it.

Saving:

save %http-scheme.r system/schemes/HTTP

Reloading:

system/schemes/HTTP: do load %http-scheme.r

If you just disable the hard-coded Content-Type setting in the HTTP code, and then provide your own one using header keyword, it should work fine, even with binary data:

read/custom <url> [header [Content-Type: <...>] post <data>]

Hope this helps.

DocKimbel
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  • Modifying the HTTP object is exactly what I needed, thanks. I'll have to look and see if there's some conversion that causes the binary data to be converted incorrectly (it was taking twice the actual bytes unless first converting it with to-string). – Tectorum Dec 09 '16 at 05:40
  • This looks like an explicit, or more probably implicit, `form` call, converting the data to a string. If you can't find it, let me know, I'll give it a quick look. – DocKimbel Dec 09 '16 at 12:38