A reader asked for help using Brightcove's API to upload a video using ColdFusion. While I do not plan on writing a full wrapper, or going into great detail, I thought a quick blog post on what he tried, and why it failed, could help others who plan on using the service.

Let's first look at his original code and a description of the problem he had.

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1  <cfhttp url="http://api.brightcove.com/services/post" method="post"
2  timeout="600" result="resultVar" multipart="true">
3  
4   <cfhttpparam type="file" name="file" file="c:\com\brightcove\AT_T_test.mp4" />
5  
6   <cfset jsonRequest = '{"method": "create_video", "params":
7  {"video": {"name": "test", "shortDescription": "test"},"token":
8  "blahblahblah.."}}'>
9  
10   <cfhttpparam type="url" name="json" value="#jsonRequest#">
11  
12   <cfhttpparam type="body" name="json" value="#jsonRequest#">
13  
14  </cfhttp>

Even without knowing the API, you can see that it makes use of JSON to pass parameters about the upload. This code won't work at all because you can't mix a httpparam of type body with type file. The API docs though seemed to imply you needed to send the JSON values as the body. I first attempted to simply save the JSON to the file system and send it as a second file. This didn't work. I then dig a bit of digging and discovered this forum post by the Brightcove team: http://forum.brightcove.com/brgh/board/message?board.id=Developer_2&message.id=85

It pointed out that the JSON data could be sent as a form field, and it showed that my reader was missing a bit of data as well. Oddly - another issue was the order of the HTTP params. I can't image why this makes a difference, but if the JSON data isn't the first httpparam, then nothing else works. The final, working code, is below. Note - I removed his API key so you can't run this as is.

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1  <cfset json = '{"method": "create_video", "params": {"video": {"name":
2  "CFHTTP create","shortDescription": "test video"},"token":
3  "falkeapikey"},"filename":
4  "actual2.mp4","maxsize":640000}'>
5  
6  <cfhttp url="http://api.brightcove.com/services/post" method="post"
7  timeout="600" result="resultVar" multipart="true">
8  
9  <cfhttpparam type="formfield" name="json" value="#json#">
10  <cfhttpparam type="file" name="actual2.mp4"
11  file="/Users/ray/Documents/workspace/youtubecfc/unittests/actual2.mp4"
12  />
13  </cfhttp>
14  
15  <cfdump var="#resultvar#">

Anyway - I don't have time to dig into the Brightcove API more, but I'm sure someone out there could whip up a quick component.