WCF + REST: Where is the request data?

Question

I\'m currently developing a WCF RESTful service. Within the validation of the POST data, I am throwing exceptions if the request XML does not conform to our business rules.

Answer 1

So, if you declare your contract something like:

[WebInvoke(Method = "POST", UriTemplate = "create", ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json)]
 int CreateItem(Stream streamOfData);

(you can use XML instead) The streamOfData should be the body of an HTTP POST. You can deserialize it using something like:

 StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(streamId);
 String res = reader.ReadToEnd();
 NameValueCollection coll = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(res);

It's working like that for us, at least. You may want to use a different approach to get the string into an XMLDocument or something. This works for our JSON posts. Might not be the most elegant solution, but it is working.

I hope this helps.

Glenn