Question

I am creating an ASP.NET MVC3 restful web service to allow reports to be uploaded from a set of servers. When a new report is created, I want the client app to do a PUT to

• http://MyApp/Servers/%5BServerName%5D/Reports/%5BReportTime%5D

passing the content of the report as XML in the body of the request.

My question is: how do I access the content of the report in my controller? I would imagine that it is available somewhere in the HttpContext.Request object but I am reluctant to access that from my controller as it is not possible(?) to unit test that. Is it possible to tweak the routing to allow the content to be passed as one or more parameters into the controller method? The outcome needs to be RESTful, i.e. it has to PUT or POST to a URL like the one above.

Currently my routing is:

routes.MapRoute(
    "SaveReport",
    "Servers/{serverName}/Reports/{reportTime",
    new { controller = "Reports", action = "Put" },
    new { httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint("PUT") });

Is there any way to modify this to pass content from the HTTP request body into the controller method?
The controller method is currently:

public class ReportsController : Controller
{
    [HttpPut]
    public ActionResult Put(string serverName, string reportTime)
    {
        // Code here to decode and save the report
    }
}

The object I am trying to PUT to the URL is:

public class Report
{
    public int SuccessCount { get; set; }
    public int FailureOneCount { get; set; }
    public int FailureTwoCount { get; set; }
    // Other stuff
}

This question looks similar but doesn’t have any answer.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Seems like you just need to use the standard ASP.NET MVC model binding capability with the slight wrinkle that you would doing an HTTP PUT instead of the more common HTTP POST. This article series has some good samples to see how model binding is used.

Your controller code would then look like:

public class ReportsController : Controller
{
    [HttpPut]
    public ActionResult Put(Report report, string serverName, string reportTime)
    {
        if (ModelState.IsValid)
        {
            // Do biz logic and return appropriate view
        }
        else
        {
            // Return invalid request handling "view"
        }
    }
}

EDIT: ====================>>>

Jon added this code to his comment as part of the fix so I added it to the answer for others:

Create a custom ModelBinder:

public class ReportModelBinder : IModelBinder
{
    public object BindModel(
        ControllerContext controllerContext,
        ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
    {
        var xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Report));
        return (Report)xs.Deserialize(
            controllerContext.HttpContext.Request.InputStream);
    }
}

Modify the Global.asax.cs to register this model binder against the Report type:

ModelBinders.Binders[typeof(Report)] = new Models.ReportModelBinder();