Anyone know how to send this via ajax?

Question

This is pandastream's pandauploader . Except I want it to be sent via AJAX. Anyone know how I would convert this?

:javascript
  $("#returned_video_id").pandaUploader(#{Panda.signed_params('post', "/videos.json", :profiles => 'f1eb0fe2406d3fa3530eb7324f410789').to_json}, {
    onsuccess: function(){
      $(".opened_photo").fadeTo(200, 0, function() {
        $(".opened_photo").hide();
        $(".media_lib").fadeIn();
      });
    },
    upload_progress_id: "upload_progress",
    allowed_extensions: ['AAC', 'AVI', '3GP', 'FLV', 'MOV', 'MP3', 'MP4', 'MPEG', 'OGG', 'WAV', 'WEBM', 'WMA', 'WMV',
      'aac', 'avi', '3gp', 'flv', 'mov', 'mp3', 'mp4', 'mpeg', 'ogg', 'wav', 'webm', 'wma', 'wmv']
  });

Answer 1

multipart/form-data file uploads cannot be sent via XMLHttpRequest. This is because the request body is always sent as a String, encoded as UTF-8. You can't send raw binary.

If you write a custom upload receiver to expect it you can encode the file content inside text using a scheme like base-64. But this will make the upload larger (and thus slower), and in any case you can only read files from JavaScript on browsers that support the new File API.

I don't know about ‘pandastream’, but HTML file upload without page reload is usually done by posting a form with a target pointed at an <iframe>, for this reason.

(Incidentally, allowed_extensions isn't really a good idea. Apart from missing case possibilities and other missing possible extensions, on non-Windows platforms, filetype may have nothing to do with extension.)