Is there any data typing for the parameters in HTTP POST?

I am building a RESTful api using a Ruby server and a MongoDB database. The database stores objects as they are, preserving their natural data types (at least those that it supports).

At the moment I am using HTTP GET to开发者_JS百科 pass params to the API, and understandably everything in my database gets stored as strings (because thats what the ruby code sees when it accesses the params[] hash). After deployment, the API will use exclusively HTTP POST, so my question is whether its possible to specify the data types that get sent via POST individually for each parameter (say I have a "uid" which is an integer and a "name" which is a string), or do I need to cast them within Ruby before passing them onto my database?

If I need to cast them, are there any issues related to it?

No, its not possible.

Post variables are just string key value pairs.

You could however implement your own higher level logic.

For example a common practice is to put a suffix to the names. For example everything that ends with _i gets parsed as integer and so on.

However what benefit would it bring to preserve the types? Or better asked. How do you output them? Is it only for storage?

Then it should not be a problem to convert the strings to proper types if that benefits your application and cast them back to strings before delivering.