Sending File in Chunks to HttpHandler

Question

I'm trying to send a file in chunks to an HttpHandler but when I receive the request in the HttpContext, the inputStream is empty.

So a: while sending I'm not sure if my HttpWebRequest is valid and b: while receiving I'm not sure how to retrieve the stream in the HttpContext

Any help greatly appreciated!

This how I make my request from client code:

private void Post(byte[] bytes)
    {
        HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://localhost:2977/Upload");
        req.Method = "POST";
        req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        req.SendChunked = true;
        req.Timeout = 400000;
        req.ContentLength = bytes.Length;
        req.KeepAlive = true;

        using (Stream s = req.GetRequestStream())
        {
            s.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
            s.Close();
        }

        HttpWebResponse res = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
    }

this is how I handle the request in the HttpHandler:

public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
        Stream chunk = context.Request.InputStream; //it's empty!
        FileStream output = new FileStream("C:\\Temp\\myTempFile.tmp", FileMode.Append);

        //simple method to append each chunk to the temp file
        CopyStream(chunk, output);
    }

Answer 1

I suspect it might be confusing that you are uploading it as form-encoded. but that isn't what you are sending (unless you're glossing over something). Is that MIME type really correct?

How big is the data? Do you need chunked upload? Some servers might not like this in a single request; I'd be tempted to use multiple simple requests via WebClient.UploadData.

Answer 2

i was trying the same idea and was successfull in sending file through Post httpwebrequest. Please see the following code sample

private void ChunkRequest(string fileName,byte[] buffer)


{
//Request url, Method=post Length and data.
string requestURL = "http://localhost:63654/hello.ashx";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(requestURL);
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

// Chunk(buffer) is converted to Base64 string that will be convert to Bytes on the handler.
string requestParameters = @"fileName=" + fileName +
"&data=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode( Convert.ToBase64String(buffer) );

// finally whole request will be converted to bytes that will be transferred to HttpHandler
byte[] byteData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(requestParameters);

request.ContentLength = byteData.Length;

Stream writer = request.GetRequestStream();
writer.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length);
writer.Close();
// here we will receive the response from HttpHandler
StreamReader stIn = new StreamReader(request.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());
string strResponse = stIn.ReadToEnd();
stIn.Close();
}

I have blogged about it, you see the whole HttpHandler/HttpWebRequest post here http://aspilham.blogspot.com/2011/03/file-uploading-in-chunks-using.html I hope this will help