HTTP/S Calls

BoxLang makes it really easy to interact with any HTTP/S endpoint via the http tag/construct. The http call will generate an HTTP/S request and parse the response into a nice BoxLang structure.

bx:http url="https://www.google.com/" result="result" {
    bx:httpparam name="q" type="url" value="test";
}
dump( result )

You can use ANY http method in the http calls, the default is a GET operation.

As you can see from the example above, you can pass parameters to the HTTP request by using the child httpparam construct. This parameter can be of many different types: header, body, xml, cgi, file, url, formfield, cookie depending on the requirements of the http endpoint.

The Result Structure

The result structure will contain the following keys:

Key	Description
statusCode	The HTTP response code and reason string.
fileContent	The body of the HTTP response. Usually a string, but could also be a Byte Array.
responseHeader	A structure of response headers, the keys are header names and the values are either the header value or an array of values if multiple headers with the same name exist.
errorDetail	An error message if applicable.
mimeType	The mime type returned in the Content-Type response header.
text	A boolean indicateing if the response body is text or binary
charset	The character set returned in the Content-Type header.
header	All the http response headers as a single string.

HTTP Arguments

This construct accepts many arguments with different features you can use when executing http/s calls, below we list just the most common ones.

Argument	Type	Default	Description
url	URL		The http/s endpoint to hit
port	numeric	80/443	The port of the endpoint to hit. 80 for http and 443 for https
method	string	GET	The http method to use.
username	string		An optional server username
password	string		An optional server password
useragent	string	BoxLang	The user agent to simulate for the request
charset	string	utf-8	The encoding to use
resolveUrl	boolean	false	No does not resolve URLs in the response body. As a result, any relative URL links in the response body do not work. Yes resolves URLs in the response body to absolute URLs, including the port number, so that links in a retrieved page remain functional.
redirect	boolean	true	If the response header includes a location field, determines whether to redirect execution to the URL specified in the field.
timeout	numeric	unlimited	A value in seconds of the max time to take for the request.
getAsBinary	string	auto	If yes, convert to BoxLang binary type, No keep as text, auto let BoxLang detect and convert as necessary
result	string	http	The name of the variable you want the result structured returned into
multipart	boolean	false	Tells BoxLang to send all data specified by httpparam type="formField" tags as multipart form data, with a Content-Type of multipart/form-data.

Basically, you can do any type of http/s calls and consume any type of RESTFul webservices with a nice BoxLang syntax!

HTTPParam

As mentioned before in our example we can use the httpparam construct to pass parameters to the http/s endpoint. The parameters can be of different types as we can see in the following table.

httpParam type=""  name=""  value=""  file=""  encoded=""  mimetype="";

Param Types

Type	Description
header	Specifies an HTTP header. Does not URL encode the value
body	Specifies that the value is the body of the HTTP request.
xml	Identifies the request as having a content-type of text/xml and specifies that the value attribute contains the body of the HTTP request.
cgi	Same as header but URL encodes the value by default.
file	Tells BoxLang to send the contents of the specified file.
url	Specifies a URL query string name-value pair to append to the http url attribute. URL encodes the value.
formfield	Specifies a form field to send. URL encodes the value by default.
cookie	Specifies a cookie to send as an HTTP header. URL encodes the value.

Param Arguments

The available param arguments to the httpparam construct are:

Argument	Type	Default	Description
type	string		The type of data from the available types above
name	string		The variable name for the data
value	string		The value of the variable
file	path		Applies to file type; ignored for all other types. The absolute path to the file that is sent with the request.
encoded	boolean	false	Applies to formfield and cgi types; ignored for all other types. Specifies whether to URLEncode the form field or header.
mimetype	string		Applies to file type; invalid for all other types. Specifies the MIME media type of the file contents. The content type can include an identifier for the character encoding of the file; for example, text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 indicates that the file is HTML text in the ISO Latin-1 character encoding.

Here is another example for you:

bx:http url="https://myrestapp.com/user" result="result" method="post" {
        bx:httpparam name="x-api-token" type="header" value="123";
        bx:httpparam
                type="body"
                value=serializeJson( '{
                        name : "luis",
                         age : 2
                }' );

}
dump( result )