Well that was a total waste of a morning. Long story short was that I wanted to be able to create documents in a Domino database, but not require a form to do it. Naturally I created an agent that my HTML form could post to. All was going well, but I decided that I also wanted to be able to attach an image as well as some simple form fields. So, after a little more work, my agent reading the ‘multipart/form-data’ with the help of the Apache commons fileupload library. That itself was a bit of a trick since all the examples assume you are using it in a servlet context. There is a way however, to use the agent’s DocumentContext document instead of the HTTPRequest object. All this was working fantastic… only when I started looking at the attachments I created did I discover a huge(!!!) problem. My images were corrupt. At first I though maybe I didn’t have something set right with the Apache code, but alas, after wasting an entire morning, it turns out Domino was to blame. On top of that, it apparently has been a problem for a long time and is still, broken on 8.5.2.

What is happening is that when Domino writes the binary data coming from the HTTP request to the DocumenContext document, it converts the contents to LMBCS and thus totally messes up my binary POST data. There is nothing I can do to get access to the original data, short of writing a actual servlet - which probably won’t work anyway.

ARRGGG!!!!!

Fine. Lesson learned. Domino is not a good HTTP server. Ya I know there are easier ways to do this with forms and file upload controls and what not but that’s not the point though. This stuff should work.