I want to send a POST request with an Electron webview from the outer script. At the moment I just set the src attribute to trigger a page load, which sends a GET request:

<webview id="view">
<script>
document.getElementById('view').setAttribute('src', '/?foo=bar');
</script>

Is there any way to navigate the webview to a URL by sending a POST request? Maybe a method of the webview, instead of just hacking with the src?

I want to send a POST request with an Electron webview from the outer script. At the moment I just set the src attribute to trigger a page load, which sends a GET request:

<webview id="view">
<script>
document.getElementById('view').setAttribute('src', 'http://example./?foo=bar');
</script>

Is there any way to navigate the webview to a URL by sending a POST request? Maybe a method of the webview, instead of just hacking with the src?

• javascript
• webview
• http-post
• electron

• 1 Maybe load a special page that executes <form method="post">? Could that work? Or inject that JavaScript code into the <webview> that does that? – flori Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 6:36
• I think you have the best answer that will work in all cases - injecting a FORM into the webview that you can submit by programatically pressing the submit button etc. ! If you submit it as an answer you'll win the bounty (-: – hippietrail Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 13:58

4 Answers 4

You can execute arbitrary code from within the webview context with .executeJavaScript.

Moreover your code has access to all browser built-in apis. Easiest would be to use fetch, with method set to post.

In your case (provided the webview has been already loaded; for example its .src has been set):

document.getElementById('view')
  .executeJavaScript('fetch("http://example./?foo=bar", {method: "post"});');

Some remarks:

1. The origin of the request is controlled by .src of the webview.
2. It seems that all default security policy are still used by webview - specifically you cannot make calls to http: from https:.
3. It is bit painful to pass code as a string.

Now there is a new <webview>.loadURL() method with a postData option in the docs. I haven't used it yet but it looks exactly like what I was looking for in the past.

It seems they added it as a feature in the meantime.

Basically, Webview element does not have a property like "method" of Form so you can not specify a particular HTTP method for its request. I remend you to use AngularJS or any other JS frameworks to archive your purpose.

I found two workaround since <webview> does not seem to currently have any way to send a POST request.

1. Maybe the site you're using will let you send the form as a GET by adding any form elements to the URL's query string. It turns out the site I was using did allow this and I wouldn't've guessed had I not actually tried.
2. You might be able to send a POST manually through AJAX/fetch etc then replace the HTML of the page in the webview with the HTML returned by your manual POST. You can achieve this using .executeJavaScript() and/or Electron's IPC.

Neither workaround will work in every case. It might be worth filing a feature request with the Electron team too...

So I just went ahead and submitted a feature request. You can follow it here: https://discuss.atom.io/t/add-http-post-method-to-webview/29702