Fix for: 500 Null Corrupt form data: no leading boundary

Another 500 Null Error / Solution

I ran into a strange error in the registration section of TheHealthChallenge.com where Internet Explorer users (Editors Note: Remove defamatory comments re: Internet Explorer Development Team and gratuitious comparisons about the size of their brains vs. size of their egos ) clicking a button would cause a 500 Null.

Here are the error details:


500
Corrupt form data: no leading boundary: != -----------------------------7d93d92a60680

java.io.IOException: Corrupt form data: no leading boundary: != -----------------------------7d93d92a60680
at com.oreilly.servlet.multipart.MultipartParser.(MultipartParser.java:174)
at com.oreilly.servlet.multipart.MultipartParser.(MultipartParser.java:93)


Can anyone venture a guess as to what the problem was? You want more information? Take a look at the form code as well:

Here is the HTML for the Form:

By the looks of the HTML code above, a single button will be drawn on the screen along with some friendly text. So why the error?

Solution

Apparently Internet Explorer does not handle serializing the form post if there is no content and what it sends to the server is not what the server expects. Possible resolutions for this are to remove the [enctype=”multipart/form-data”] attribute or change the [method=”post”] to [method=”get”]. Either one will work as intended.

I happened to create this set of circumstances by using the CFUniform library in a way it was not designed for. I mentioned this to Matt Quackenbush who reworked the inner workings of the CFUniform Library to intelligently figure out if a file upload control is in the form or not. If one exists, the [enctype=”multipart/form-data”] attribute will be included automatically. If you experience the 500 Null problem listed in this post, and you are using the CFUniform Library, simply update your version from http://cfuniform.riaforge.org/ and you’ll be all set.