Getting Gibberish instead of Hello World from a service with webHttpBinding

Answer 1

That's not gibberish - it's the base64-encoded version of the ASCII bytes for "Hello World" (with a space).

When you ask a web service to transmit bytes, it will use base64... your web service client will perform the base64 decoding automatically, to get you back the original bytes.

(I wouldn't suggest using Encoding.ASCII, mind you.)

It's not clear what your "legacy HTTP client" is, or what it's expecting, so we can't really tell whether returning a byte array is actually the best answer or not.

Answer 2

The SOAP specification states that raw binary data should be base64 encoded. So the behavior you witness is correct.

If you need to transmit ASCII character data. You can use one message contract and a raw Message.

Message DoIt(DoItRequest request)

The raw message will create the response containing ASCII data. The message contract is used to retrieve the int parameter you mentioned:

[MessageContract]
public class DoItRequest
{
  [MessageBodyMember] public int data;
}

This page explains how to work with the Message class.

Answer 3

Googled for a proper way to integrate and found that people are stuck just as I am (please correct me if I am wrong on that). So far the following workaround works fine for me:

  public class Hello : IHello
  {
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "manager")]
        [OperationContract]
        Message DoIt();
  }

  public class Hello : IHello
  {
        public Message DoIt()
        {
          var webContext = WebOperationContext.Current;
          var request = webContext.IncomingRequest;
          var queryParameters = request.UriTemplateMatch.QueryParameters;
          var data = queryParameters["data"];

          var result = new StringBuilder(@"
              <?xml version='1.0'?>
              ...
          ");

          var response = webContext.CreateTextResponse(result.ToString(), "application/xml", Encoding.ASCII);

          return response;
        }
  }

If there is a better alternative - it would be perfect to know about it.