Can service workers cache POST requests?

I've used the following solution in a recent project with a GraphQL API: I cached all responses from API routes in an IndexedDB object store using a serialized representation of the Request as cache key. Then I used the cache as a fallback if the network was unavailable:

// ServiceWorker.js
self.addEventListener('fetch', function(event) {
    // We will cache all POST requests to matching URLs
    if(event.request.method === "POST" || event.request.url.href.match(/*...*/)){
        event.respondWith(
            // First try to fetch the request from the server
        fetch(event.request.clone())
            // If it works, put the response into IndexedDB
            .then(function(response) {
                // Compute a unique key for the POST request
                var key = getPostId(request);
                // Create a cache entry
                var entry = {
                    key: key,
                    response: serializeResponse(response),
                    timestamp: Date.now()
                };

                /* ... save entry to IndexedDB ... */

                // Return the (fresh) response
                return response;
            })
            .catch(function() {
                // If it does not work, return the cached response. If the cache does not
                // contain a response for our request, it will give us a 503-response
                var key = getPostId(request);
                var cachedResponse = /* query IndexedDB using the key */;
                return response;
            })
        );
    }
})

function getPostId(request) {
    /* ... compute a unique key for the request incl. it's body: e.g. serialize it to a string */
}

Here is the full code for my specific solution using Dexie.js as IndexedDB-wrapper. Feel free to use it!

If you are talking about form data, then you could intercept the fetch event and read the form data in a similar way as below and then save the data in indexedDB.

//service-worker.js
self.addEventListener('fetch', function(event) {
      if(event.request.method === "POST"){
         var newObj = {};

               event.request.formData().then(formData => {

                for(var pair of formData.entries()) {
                  var key = pair[0];
                  var value =  pair[1];
                  newObj[key] = value;
                }

              }).then( ...save object in indexedDB... )
      }
})

You can't cache POST requests using the Cache API. See https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/#cache-put (point 4).

There's a related discussion in the spec repository: https://github.com/slightlyoff/ServiceWorker/issues/693

An interesting solution is the one presented in the ServiceWorker Cookbook: https://serviceworke.rs/request-deferrer.html Basically, the solution serializes requests to IndexedDB.