Reading HttpRequest Body in REST WCF

Question

I got a REST WCF Service running in .net 4 and I've tested the web service it is working and accepting HttpRequest I make to it. But I ran into a problem trying to access the HttpRequest body within the web service. I've tried sending random sizes of data appended on the HttpRequest using both Fiddler and my WinForm app and I can't seem to find any objects in runtime where I can find my request body is located. My initial instinct was to look in the HttpContext.Current.Request.InputStream but the length of that property is 0, so I tried looking in IncomingWebRequestContext that object doesn't even have a method nor properties to get the body of the HttpRequest.

So my question is, is there actually a way to access the HttpRequest request body in WCF?

PS: The data inside the request body is JSON strings and for response it would return the data inside response body as JSON string too.

Answer 1

Try with ((System.ServiceModel.Channels.BufferedMessageData)(((System.ServiceModel.Channels.BufferedMessage)((OperationContext.Current.RequestContext).RequestMessage)).MessageData)).Buffer

it has type System.ArraySegment<byte>

or read WCF + REST: Where is the request data?

Answer 2

Much simpler, this answer on WCF + REST: Where is the request data? works fine.

Also, if your request body is deserializable, you can just pass a class. Barring some typos, this should work:

public class Banana
{
    public string Colour;
    public int Size;
}

...

[WebInvoke(
    Method = "POST", 
    UriTemplate = "bananas", 
    ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json, 
    RequestFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json)]
string CreateBanana(Banana banana);

...

public string CreateBanana(Banana banana)
{
    return "It's a " + banana.Colour + " banana!";
}

Doing POST with data {"Colour": "blue", "Size": 5} to this resource should return "It's a blue banana!".