CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.net.netasp.net-web-api
Chris
Chris

Reputation: 2806

HttpSelfHostServer not recognizing "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" Requests

I'm working with an HttpSelfHostServer in .Net 4.5 and it seems to only be able to determine the controller and action when I send a request using QueryString. It doesn't work if I use "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".

Here's the HttpSelfHostServer code.

private static HttpSelfHostConfiguration _config;
private static HttpSelfHostServer _server;
public static readonly string SelfHostUrl = "http://localhost:8989";

internal static void Start()
{
    _config = new HttpSelfHostConfiguration(SelfHostUrl);
    _config.HostNameComparisonMode = HostNameComparisonMode.Exact;
    _config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
        name: "API Default",
        routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}",
        defaults: new { action = RouteParameter.Optional },
        constraints: null);

    _server = new HttpSelfHostServer(_config);

    _server.OpenAsync().Wait();
}

The controller code.

public class SettingsController : ApiController
{
    [HttpPost]
    public bool Test(bool work)
    {
        return work;
    }
}

Here is the response I get when attempting to access it via REST Console using

Request URL: http://localhost:8989/api/Settings/Test
Request Method:POST
Status Code:404 Not Found
Request Headersview source
Accept:*/*
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:no-cache
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:9
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Host:localhost:8989
Origin:chrome-extension://cokgbflfommojglbmbpenpphppikmonn
Pragma:no-cache
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 
           (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36
Form Dataview parsed
work=true
Response Headersview source
Content-Length:205
Content-Type:application/json; charset=utf-8
Date:Mon, 23 Dec 2013 22:41:10 GMT
Server:Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0

So, if I change my request to a post to the url below, it works.

http://localhost:8989/api/Settings/Test?work=true

Why isn't Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded working?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1261

Answers (2)

Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan
Badrinarayanan Lakshmiraghavan

Reputation: 19311

Your action method parameter is bool, which is a simple type. By default, ASP.NET Web API populates it from URI path or query string. That is the reason http://localhost:8989/api/Settings/Test?work=true works.

When you send the same in the request body, it does not work because ASP.NET Web API binds body to a complex type (class) by default and hence the body will not be bound to your argument type bool. To ask Web API to bind the simple type from body, change your action method like this.

public bool Test([FromBody]bool work)

Then, you will need to send only the value in the body, like this.

=true.

Upvotes: 2

Richard Schneider
Richard Schneider

Reputation: 35477

The problem is not with the Content-Type. The rest console uses AJAX and CORS, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing. This is indicated by the Origin http header in the request.

The server that contains the SettingsController must support CORS. If it doesn't the AJAX request will always return a 404.

The easiest way for you to support CORS is to always return a Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * in the request HTTP headers.

Upvotes: 0

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