# Submitting a form with file attachment

When doing web automation with Apify, it can sometimes be necessary to submit an HTML form with a file attachment. This article will cover a situation where the file is publicly accessible (e.g. hosted somewhere) and will use an Apify Actor. If it's impossible to use request-promise, it might be necessary to use https://docs.apify.com/academy/puppeteer-playwright/common-use-cases/submitting-a-form-with-a-file-attachment.

**How to submit a form with attachment using request-promise.**

***

After creating a new Actor, the first thing to do is download the file. We can do that using the request-promise module, so make sure it is included.


```
const request = require('request-promise');
```


The actual downloading is going to be slightly different for text and binary files. For a text file, do it like this:


```
const fileData = await request('https://example.com/file.txt');
```


For a binary file, we need to provide additional parameters so as not to interpret it as text:


```
const fileData = await request({
    uri: 'https://example.com/file.pdf',
    encoding: null,
});
```


In this case, fileData will be a Buffer instead of a String.

## Submitting the form

When the file is ready, we can submit the form as follows:


```
await request({
    uri: 'https://example.com/submit-form.php',
    method: 'POST',

    formData: {
        // set any form values
        name: 'John',
        surname: 'Doe',
        email: 'john.doe@example.com',

        // add the attachment
        attachment: {
            value: fileData,
            options: {
                filename: 'file.pdf',
                contentType: 'application/pdf',
            },
        },
    },
});
```


The header Content-Type: multipart/form-data will be set automatically.
