Your First Week With Node.js

Chapter 4: Forms, File Uploads and Security with Node.js and Express

by Mark Brown

If you’re building a web application, you’re likely to encounter the need to build HTML forms on day one. They’re a big part of the web experience, and they can be complicated.

Typically the form handling process involves:

• displaying an empty HTML form in response to an initial GET request
• user submitting the form with data in a POST request
• validation on both the client and the server
• re-displaying the form populated with escaped data and error messages if invalid
• doing something with the sanitized data on the server if it’s all valid
• redirecting the user or showing a success message after data is processed.

Handling form data also comes with extra security ...