POSTing multipart/form-data to a WCF REST service: the action changes

Question

I have a WCF Rest service:

      [WebHelp(Comment = "Sample description for GetData")]
    [WebInvoke(Method="POST", UriTemplate = "invoke", BodyStyle =WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]
    [OperationContract]
    public string GetData( Stream input)
    {
        long incomingLength = WebOperationContext.Current.IncomingRequest.ContentLength;
        string[] result = new string[incomingLength];
        int cnter = 0;
        int arrayVal = -1;
        do
        {
            if (arrayVal != -1) result[cnter++] = Convert.ToChar(arrayVal).ToString();

            arrayVal = input.ReadByte();
        } while (arrayVal != -1);

        return incomingLength.ToString();
    }

That I want to upload files (well, file; one at a time) to. Using this form to test:

    <form method="post" action="Service.svc/invoke" >
        <input type="file" name="aFile" />
    </form>
    <input type="button" onclick="document.forms[0].submit();" />

I can see the service receive the data, even though with the enctype of the form being set to 'multipart/form-data', only receive the element name and the name of the uploaded file. However, if I set the enctype, I get nothing; the service is never hit. I put a break in the code to see what was going on, and it was never reached. Do I need to do something special in the URITemplate attribute for the 'multipart/form-data' enctype? What else am I missing? For the heck of it, I used Fiddler to see what was being sent to the service with each option, and there was nothing sinister looking.

Without 'multipart/form-data':

POST /Service4/Service.svc/invoke HTTP/1.1 Accept: application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, / Referer: /Service4/form.htm Accept-Language: en-US User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Host: okrd14144 Content-Length: 89 Connection: Keep-Alive Pragma: no-cache

With: POST /Service4/Service.svc/invoke HTTP/1.1 Accept: application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, / Referer: /Service4/form.htm Accept-Language: en-US User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------7da1ce3aa0bd0 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Host: okrd14144 Content-Length: 150119 Connection: Keep-Alive Pragma: no-cache

I'm out of ideas

Answer 1

Did you see this question? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1354749/wcf-service-to-accept-a-post-encoded-multipart-form-data