How to send a document in net.HTTP.request as a POST variable?

Question

I have read and reread the doc on net.HTTP.request, and it says I can pass an argument of oRequest, but I have not succeeded at passing in the current document, which is what I want to do.
I've tried app.activeDocs[0], or encoding that to a string, but though it makes the call without error, nothing is sent.
Should oRequest be simply a document, or a variable made up of name-value pairs? How do we send multiple parameters to a POST otherwise?
I've succeeded fine with calling using GET, but when I tried to pass the document as a GET variable, I got nothing either.
I'm sending to a LiveCycle REST end point so either POST or GET is fine.
Thanks!

Answer 1

POSTing the current document is straightforward *provided* your script is running outside the document context (i.e. in the console or a folder-level script). There's no access from doc-level scripts for obvious reasons.
For example, putting this in the JS console will POST the current file to a URL:
Net.HTTP.request({
  cVerb:'POST',
  cURL: 'http://localhost/submit.php',
  oRequest: Collab.documentToStream(this),
  oHandler: {
    response: function (msg, uri, err) {
       if (err!=undefined) app.alert(msg);
Your problem with talking to a vanilla webservice is that you cannot send the RFC1867 delimeters (i.e. form a "multipart/form-data" request) as the ReadStream object doesn't have a concatenation method in the Acrobat JSAPI. That's also how you would usually prepend other form fields, but if you're careful with your server-side coding you can send those as GET parameters in cURL. Normally you'd be polite and pass a Context-Type header in the aHeaders array - it won't matter to the transmission process but will allow your webservice to predict what the heck it's been sent.
Your webservice will then have to read the raw data. In PHP for example, you won't get anything in the $_FILES global but you can grab the PDF by reading everything from the input buffer, with the line:
$pdf = file_get_contents("php://input");
If that line was in the server script that the above JS code was aimed at, the variable $pdf will contain an exact binary copy of the currently-open document.