Why is Node.js getting an empty body from a POST request?

Question

When the form below is submitted against the following Node.js code, the data event is not triggered at all; the code goes straight to req.on('end', callback);

function addEvent(req, res) {
    "use strict";

    var body = '';

    req.setEncoding('utf8');
    req.on('data', function(chunk) {
        console.log('Got %d bytes of data', chunk.length);
        body += chunk;
    });
    req.on('end', function() {
        console.log('addEvent() request body: [%s]', body);
        var postData = qs.parse(body);
        dbInsertStmt.run(postData.name, postData.startDate, postData.startTime, postData.endTime, postData.anchor, postData.location, function() {
            serveFromDisk('public/admin.html', res);
        });
    });
}

The form

    <form action="../events" method="post" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">
        <div class="form-group">
            <label for="name">Nom</label>
            <input type="text" class="form-control" id="name" placeholder="Nom de l'événement">
        </div>
        ...
        <button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">Additionner événment</button>
    </form>

What I see on the logs

Incoming request: POST /events
addEvent() request body: []

Any idea as to why the request body is empty?

Answer 1

The form's <input> tags were missing the name attribute. Without them, the browser does not send the fields at all.

The fix:

<input type="text" class="form-control" id="name" name="name" placeholder="Nom de l'événement">

I'm surprised as I copied the form HTML from Bootstrap's examples .