Dealing with Request Data — Werkzeug v0.8.2 documentation

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# Dealing with Request Data

The most important rule about web development is “Do not trust the user”. This is especially true for incoming request data on the input stream. With WSGI this is actually a bit harder than you would expect. Because of that Werkzeug wraps the request stream for you to save you from the most prominent problems with it.

## Missing EOF Marker on Input Stream

The input stream has no end-of-file marker. If you would call the `read()` method on the wsgi.input stream you would cause your application to hang on conforming servers. This is actually intentional however painful. Werkzeug solves that problem by wrapping the input stream in a special `LimitedStream`. The input stream is exposed on the request objects as `stream`. This one is either an empty stream (if the form data was parsed) or a limited stream with the contents of the input stream.

## When does Werkzeug Parse?

Werkzeug parses the incoming data under the following situations:

- you access either `form`, `files`, or `stream` and the request method was POST or PUT.
- if you call `parse_form_data()`.

These calls are not interchangeable. If you invoke `parse_form_data()` you must not use the request object or at least not the attributes that trigger the parsing process.

This is also true if you read from the wsgi.input stream before the parsing.

General rule: Leave the WSGI input stream alone. Especially in WSGI middlewares. Use either the parsing functions or the request object. Do not mix multiple WSGI utility libraries for form data parsing or anything else that works on the input stream.

## How does it Parse?

The standard Werkzeug parsing behavior handles three cases:

- input content type was multipart/form-data. In this situation the `stream` will be empty and `form` will contain the regular POST / PUT data, `files` will contain the uploaded files as `FileStorage` objects.
- input content type was application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Then the `stream` will be empty and `form` will contain the regular POST / PUT data and `files` will be empty.
- the input content type was neither of them, `stream` points to a `LimitedStream` with the input data for further processing.

Special note on the `data` attribute: Accessing this loads the full request data into memory. This is only safe to do if the `max_content_length` is set. Also you can either read the stream or access `data`.

## Limiting Request Data

To avoid being the victim of a DDOS attack you can set the maximum accepted content length and request field sizes. The `BaseRequest` class has two attributes for that: `max_content_length` and `max_form_memory_size`.

The first one can be used to limit the total content length. For example by setting it to `1024 * 1024 * 16` the request won’t accept more than 16MB of transmitted data.

Because certain data can’t be moved to the hard disk (regular post data) whereas temporary files can, there is a second limit you can set. The `max_form_memory_size` limits the size of POST transmitted form data. By setting it to `1024 * 1024 * 2` you can make sure that all in memory-stored fields is not more than 2MB in size.

This however does not affect in-memory stored files if the stream_factory used returns a in-memory file.

## How to extend Parsing?

Modern web applications transmit a lot more than multipart form data or url encoded data. Extending the parsing capabilities by subclassing the `BaseRequest` is simple. The following example implements parsing for incoming JSON data:

    from werkzeug.utils import cached_property
    from werkzeug.wrappers import Request
    from simplejson import loads

    class JSONRequest(Request):
        # accept up to 4MB of transmitted data.
        max_content_length = 1024 * 1024 * 4

        @cached_property
        def json(self):
            if self.headers.get('content-type') == 'application/json':
                return loads(self.data)