Does the Content-Type of a POST or PUT request need to be 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' in a WCF ReSTful service?

Question

Hello everyone. What I am trying to do is, seemingly, simple: send some POX via the request body, have the WCF service process it, and return a 201 status code. In my ServiceContract I have defined the following method:

    [WebInvoke(Method = "PUT", UriTemplate = "/content/add", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml, RequestFormat=WebMessageFormat.Xml)]
    [OperationContract]
    Stream AddContent(Stream input);

The verb here doesn't matter; I could easily replace 'PUT' with 'POST' and wind up with the same result. The implementation of the above method is as follows:

    public Stream AddContent(Stream input)
    {
        WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.Created;
    }

Since what this method actually does is of little consequence I have omitted all of the procedural code. To test this functionality I fired up Fiddler and issued the following request:

 User-Agent: Fiddler
 Host: myhost.com
 Content-Length: 771
 Content-Type: text/xml && application/xml; charset: utf8
 <xmlDataGoesHere></xmlDataGoesHere>

The supplied value for Content-Type is incorrect, I know, I am just using it to illustrate the Content-Type's that I have tried. If I click on 'Execute' in Fiddler the response code from my service is 400 Bad Request. It is worth noting that my service method is not actually getting hit in this secnario, the request dies before it even gets there. So after copious amounts of reading and process of elimination I changed the Content-Type to :

 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

If I execute the Fiddler request now the status code returned from my service is 201 Created. Is there something I am missing as to why I can't set the Content-Type to anything but URLEncoded? I have tried tweaking the BodyStyle and RequestFormat properties in the ServiceContract but those did not have any impact on the outcome. Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening?

Answer 1

I think the problem is related to the fact that when you send XML to a WebHttpBinding, it detects that you are sending XML and tries to deserialize it. It ignores the fact that your signature is expecting a stream. There are workarounds that I have seen but I can't find the links at the moment. If I find them I'll update the post.

Take a look at this http://wcfrestcontrib.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

Ok I have figured this out and the issue I am having is "by design". I found the post 'WCF "Raw" programming model - receiving arbitrary data' over at http://blogs.msdn.com/carlosfigueira/ which led to the solution. The solution here was to create my own customBinding that will return the raw encoder all the time as the blog pointed out. Thanks for all the help.