Handling input arrays in Express forms?

For bodyParser.urlencoded, if you set the extended option to true, attribute names of the format property[nestedProperty] will be interpreted by the bodyParser middleware as:

{ property: nestedPropert: $value }

Just be sure to initialize the middleware like so:

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true });

Afterwards, change the above form declaration to have the message property be an object, instead of a string value, like so:

form(action='', method='POST')    - for (var i = 0; i < messages_ids.length; i++)        - var message_id = messages_ids[i]        //- so we're treating each index like a property of `message`        input(type='text', name='messages[#{i}][message]')        input(type='text', name='messages[{#{i}}][author]')        input(type='hidden', name='messages[#{i}][id]', value='#{message_id}')    input(type='submit', value='Send')

And then, on the server side, request.body.messages would be an object, that looks like:

{  "messages": {    "1": {      "message": $message1,      "author": $author1,      "id": $id1    },    "2": {      "message": $message2,      "author": $author2,      "id": $id2    } /* , ... */  }}

And then, you can easily convert request.body.messages into an array:

var messages = Array.prototype.slice.call(request.body.messages);

And now, you should be able to access each elements like so (note: I prefer a functional style, but I'll keep it consistent with yours):

for (var i = 0; i < messages.length; i++) {  console.log({    'ObjectId' + messages[i].id,    'Message' + messages[i].message,    'Author' + messages[i].author  });}

P.S.: if you're wondering of a functional style, then here it is:

messages.forEach(function (message) {  console.log(    'ObjectId' + message.id,    'Message' + message.message,    'Author' + messages.author  );});

Edit: special thanks to @eye_mew for pointing out that we need to set extended to true.