Forms & actions

The server reads request bodies and handles plain HTML form submissions — no client framework required. A form works with JavaScript disabled; that's the progressive-enhancement baseline the framework is built on.

Reading the body

Every handler receives the parsed request. The body is read from the socket using Content-Length (capped at 8 MiB) and exposed on the request:

• req.body — the raw bytes (Vec<u8>).
• req.body_str() — the body as lossy UTF-8 text.
• req.content_length() — the declared length, if any.

GET requests and any request without a Content-Length have an empty body.

Parsing a form

The akurai_http::form module parses application/x-www-form-urlencoded — what a browser submits for <form method="post"> — with percent-decoding and + meaning space:

let pairs = akurai_http::form::parse_urlencoded(&req.body_str());
let name = akurai_http::form::field(&pairs, "name").unwrap_or("");

The Post/Redirect/Get pattern

A submission should validate, act, and then redirect to a GET, so a browser refresh never resubmits:

if name.is_empty() {
    return render_form_with_error(...);   // re-render, keep what they typed
}
store.append(&record)?;                   // do the work
Response::new(303).with_header("Location", "/guestbook")  // redirect back

Worked example: the guestbook

The live /guestbook is the full pattern end to end:

• GET /guestbook lists entries.
• POST /guestbook validates that name and message are present, stores the

entry (durably — see Storage), and 303-redirects to the list.

• On a validation error it re-renders the form with the message and the values

already typed.

Safety

User input rendered with {{ }} is HTML-escaped by the template engine, so a submitted <script> shows as text, not markup. Use {{{ }}} only for content you trust to be safe HTML.