[COUCHDB-1956] Make attachment lengths and Content-Length optional for multipart requests

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Component/s: HTTP Interface
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Nick North
• Created: 10/Dec/13 08:26
• Updated: 02/Sep/18 06:47
• Resolved: 02/Sep/18 06:47

Description

This is a placeholder for some of the work I proposed in an earlier email to the dev list.

If you submit a document and attachments as a MIME multipart/related request, you have to give lengths for each attachment in the initial JSON document and a Content-Length for the HTTP request as a whole. This is inconvenient for HTTP clients which want to stream large attachments into the HTTP request, as they may not know the attachment size in advance.

So CouchDb should be able to accept chunked multipart/related requests and attachments' lengths should not have to be specified in the JSON document. These are two distinct pieces of work but closely related, so I've put them in one issue.

Most of the groundwork is already there in CouchDb. There is support for reading chunked requests, but it's not currently used when parsing multipart/related requests. And attachment lengths are not critical to parsing attachments: the parser knows by other means when it's reached the end of an attachment, and the system internally recalculates their lengths anyway.

Work on chunked requests is complete, but I'll save the pull request until attachment lengths are also sorted.

Issue Links

• contains: COUCHDB-1403 Multipart upload fails with exception if request body is chunked