How to send a file using POST request to Spring Boot web server
As part of my studies, I was asked to upload a file to a Spring Boot server and encountered some difficulties, after I managed to solve it, I want to share the solution with you.
In this article I’ll explain how to do it with Angular 8 and Postman.
Spring Boot Web Server
MyController.java
- @RestController - for HTTP requests
- @PostMapping - for POST requests
- @RequestParam - to accept a multipart object named file
That’s all for the Spring Boot implementation.
Postman

- Choose request type as POST.
- Insert the request URL.
- Click on Body and choose form-data.
- In the key section click on Text and change it to File.

5. Click Select Files and choose a file.
6. Click Send and wait for the response.
That’s all for the Postman implementation.
Angular 8
In order to send a file via Angular we will need mainly 3 things:
- Image file (or any other file)
- HttpClient API (which is really easy to import)
- POST request to send to the server
app.module.ts
Your app module should look like this, notice you need to import HttpClientModule in order to use HttpClient API.
app.component.ts
1. Now create a variable called file to accept the file object.
2. Create a method called imageChoice to update the selected image, this method accepts the HTML event with the chosen file object in it.
3. Create a method called sendFile to implement the POST request.
this method create a FormData object and populate it with the chosen file.
app.component.html
This is how the page should look like:

That’s all for the Angular 8 implementation.
Summary
We saw how to choose a file with Postman and Angular 8 and send it as a POST request to Spring Boot server as FormData
Source code
Github repositories available for your convinience, feel free to DM me if you have any concernes or you want me to help you with workarounds with similar issues, Cheers!
