8.3: How to create a node via REST with html?

Question

I have a Drupal 8.3 setup and working and want to add content via REST. I can create nodes fine, but only in plain text. I can't figure out and can't find any documentation for how to submit content as html so it could have formatting.

I found a comment that had examples for submitting comments with basic html with the body specified like:

{"content_body": {"format": "basic_html", "value": "<b>Hi</b>"}

But when I tried to do something similar with the 'body' tag for posting to /entity/node, it returns a 422 response with this message:

Unprocessable Entity: validation failed.\nbody: Body: this field cannot hold more than 1 values

For reference, this is basically the hal+json body of the post (minus the taxonomy stuff not relevant to this question):

{
  "body": {
    "format": "basic_html", 
    "value": "<b>This is the body of the test</b>"
  }, 
  "title": {"value": "Test One"}, 
  "type": {"target_id": "Article"}
}

If I drop the 'format' tag from the body dictionary, everything works fine... except the tags are displayed and not interpreted as html.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Drupal is probably expecting an array of field data, even if the field itself only accepts a single value.

When the JSON is decoded, this is still an array:

{
  "format": "basic_html", 
  "value": "<b>This is the body of the test</b>"
},

But with 2 items, when only one is expected.

You should be able to fix by providing an array with just the one item:

"body": [{
  "format": "basic_html", 
  "value": "<b>This is the body of the test</b>"
}],