Question

How does one read the request body in ASP.NET? I’m using the REST Client add-on for Firefox to form a GET request for a resource on a site I’m hosting locally, and in the Request Body I’m just putting the string “test” to try to read it on the server.

In the server code (which is a very simple MVC action) I have this:

var reader = new StreamReader(Request.InputStream);
var inputString = reader.ReadToEnd();

But when I debug into it, inputString is always empty. I’m not sure how else (such as in FireBug) to confirm that the request body is indeed being sent properly, I guess I’m just assuming that the add-on is doing that correctly. Maybe I’m reading the value incorrectly?

Answer 1

Maybe I’m misremembering my schooling, but I think GET requests don’t actually have a body. This page states.

The HTML specifications technically define the difference between "GET" and "POST" so that former means that form data is to be encoded (by a browser) into a URL while the latter means that the form data is to appear within a message body.

So maybe you’re doing things correctly, but you have to POST data in order to have a message body?

Update

In response to your comment, the most "correct" RESTful way would be to send each of the values as its own parameter:

site.com/MyController/MyAction?id=1&id=2&id=3...

Then your action will auto-bind these if you give it an array parameter by the same name:

public ActionResult MyAction(int[] id) {...}

Or if you’re a masochist you can maybe try pulling the values out of Request.QueryString one at a time.