context.fetch() does not support binary responses or multipart form uploads

[Shubhank-Jonnada]

Summary

Two limitations in context.fetch() force integrations to bypass the SDK entirely and use aiohttp directly, which defeats the purpose of having a unified HTTP abstraction.

Problem 1: Binary File Downloads

context.fetch() internally calls response.text() for all non-JSON responses (integration.py, ~line 511), which decodes bytes as UTF-8 text. This corrupts binary content such as images, PDFs, and zip files.

There is no way to retrieve raw bytes through the current API.

Example from the Box integration — the integration has to access the internal context._session directly to call response.read():

file_content = await response.read()
content_base64 = base64.b64encode(file_content).decode("utf-8")

Problem 2: Multipart Form Uploads

context.fetch() only handles application/json and application/x-www-form-urlencoded content types. There is no support for multipart/form-data, which is required by APIs like Box's file upload endpoint.

Example from the Box integration — the integration constructs aiohttp.FormData manually and posts via context._session:

data = aiohttp.FormData()
data.add_field("attributes", json.dumps({...}), content_type="application/json")
data.add_field("file", file_content, filename=file_name, content_type=content_type)
async with context._session.post(url, data=data, headers=headers) as response:
    ...

The integration even includes a comment acknowledging the workaround: "We'll need to use a different approach for uploads."

Impact

Any integration that needs binary downloads or multipart uploads must:

• Declare aiohttp as a direct dependency
• Access the private context._session attribute (not part of the public API)
• Bypass context.fetch() entirely

Affected integrations: box

Proposed Fix

1. Add a binary=True (or raw=True) parameter to context.fetch() that returns bytes instead of calling response.text().
2. Add a form_data parameter to context.fetch() that accepts a dict or list of fields and constructs a multipart/form-data request automatically.

These additions would keep integrations within the SDK abstraction layer and avoid exposing internal aiohttp internals.