HttpWebRequest to server that does not allow chunking does not work

Question

I have some C# stubs to a Java web service (Https) (created in Visual Studio 2008, .NET 2.0). The server does not allow requests to be chunked. I was able to set sendChunked to false in the HttpWebRequest.

When I call web service methods which have very little data going across the wire they work fine.
However, when I send requests which contain a significant amount of data, I get an "unable to parse request" error.

Here's the two strange things:

1. This works fine through Java by setting the HttpConstants.CHUNKED to false, and if you don't do that it breaks with the same "Unable to parse request error".
2. If I have fiddler running in the background everything works fine?! I believe this is due to Fiddler buffering the request bytes before sending them off. NOTE: if I turn off the Fiddler option to "Decrypt HTTPS" it stops working.

Answer 1

Ah, the classic "changing the behavior by observing it". The problem is that, as you point out, Fiddler does a bunch of buffering and the like itself. One option may be turning HTTPS off (temporarily), and using a passive network sniffing tool like Wireshark to see if .NET is obeying the settings you're setting.

Answer 2

I'm not clear from your description what you mean by "stubs". Do you mean that you've created a Web Reference to the Java service?

If so, you can override the GetWebRequest method to return your own HttpWebRequest with the SendChunked property set to false:

public partial class Service1
{
    protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri uri)
    {
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) base.GetWebRequest(uri);
        request.SendChunked = false;
        return request;
    }
}

If this is not what you're asking, then please clarify.

Answer 3

I resolved this issue. Looks like when I create the stubs to the web service methods using "add a web reference" in visual studio it is adding something to the web request which was making the server unhappy. I wrote my own method which creates the XML from scratch and sends the web request without using any of the stubs and it works fine. I hate problems like this.