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

Here's how you do it without reflection:

using (var reader = OperationContext.Current.RequestContext.RequestMessage.GetReaderAtBodyContents ()) {
    if (reader.Read ())
        return new string (Encoding.ASCII.GetChars (reader.ReadContentAsBase64 ()));
                return result;
    }
}

If the reader is a HttpStreamXmlDictionaryReader (as it was in my case), the class's implementation of the method ReadContentAsBase64(byte[] buffer, int index, int count) simply passes these parameters to the Stream.Read method.

Once I have the byte[] I convert the bytes to a string via ASCII encoding. For a proper implementation, you could use the content type & encoding from the message's headers to do per HTTP spec.