Lost with http query, "cannot creat property accept" and arrays

Questions
1

Hi all,

For the past day I have been struggling with the following issue:

I need to send an array via POST request.
I’ve turned on the button “json/RAW” parameters
This is the content of the body:

{"name":"name of thing","creator":"creator name","description":"this is the description "and a quote within the description"","image":"https://url_of_ image","type":"image/png","format":"none","properties":[{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}]}

in the header I’ve put the api key {"api-key":"abcdefghijlm"}

If I run this, I get the following error:
ERROR: The data in “Body Parameters” is no valid JSON. Set Body Content Type to “RAW/Custom” for XML or other types of payloads

Right, so I tried changing the body content type to Raw/custom

Then I get the following error:
ERROR: Cannot create property ‘accept’ on string ‘{“api-key”: “abcdefghijlm”}’
I’ve seen this error around on this forum, and it didn’t make it clearer for me unfortunately. (something in the lines of that it needs to be an expression - a bug of n8n. )

Hope someone knows the answer :slight_smile:

Thanks!

2

Hi @bees8, from looking at your example payload, it seems you are trying to send invalid JSON. Specifically, the quotes in your description field aren’t escaped and your array [{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}] doesn’t have a key.

If you use syntactically correct JSON the request should work as expected like so:

Result:

image
image1311×696 81.5 KB

Requested arriving on the server:

image
image1096×521 18.4 KB

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions on this :slight_smile:

3

hey mutedjam! Thanks for the answer. The issue is that the description content is dynamic, I will not know if there are characters being used that would need an escape. How would I be able to account for that?
Regarding the array - yes I edited my json later :slight_smile: I just typed it wrongly here!
I have used the escape characters, without avail. Actually, I used the exact same json as you, but it gave me now the second error:
ERROR: Cannot create property ‘accept’ on string… etc
At least we resolved the first error :slight_smile:

4

As long as your incoming data is valid JSON you wouldn’t need to worry about escaping it. Assuming your JSON comes through in a field called myBody you could do something like this:

5

wonderful, thats great :slight_smile:

Do you have any idea about the error?
I came around these topics
Probem with JSON/RAW Parameters - HTTP Request - Questions - n8n
and some others, but frankly I’m quite lost now

6

Not really, the topic you have linked was solved after all by sending a valid JSON object, similar to what my latest example workflow would do.

Perhaps you can provide a workflow using which I can reproduce your problem? This would help a lot.

7

thanks,
I cant really share the workflow, it is basically this json with a http request and an api key.
Is there a way to use an array without using the “json/raw” parameters button turned on? Because that’s when it did work (without the array). Thanks!

8

@MutedJam I managed to find a workaround, or even just a good solution lol.

the api key could just go into the header authenticiation, didn’t think about that! After that, all worked fine with that one error!

I have tried so much stuff that I lost a bit track of what I actually did. But in the end I managed to make it fully work, by following your mock data without the equal sign in front ( putting the json between {{ }} in the set node). Now, one last final step… I want to pass on different output data in that json file. But when I do somehow it doesnt work. This is probably the last missing link!