Question

I have a stock WCF Rest application (default Web.config, Web Routing). I am unable to get the WCF framework to auto de-serialize the request stream into typed objects. I have a service with a method sig in the form…

[WebInvoke(Method = "POST", 
            UriTemplate = "", 
            BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest, 
            ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
MethodA(FirstParam first, SecondParam second)

If I initiate a request from fiddler or jQuery using $.ajax I get a 400 Bad Request error. I’ve done plenty of searching and found that changing the method sig to use a System.IO.Stream allows the method to be executed, however it also adds the overhead of de-serializing the objects.

The raw request body is as follows

{
    "first":"{\"p1\":\"p1 value\",\"p2\":\"p2 value\",\"p3\":100\"p4\":null}",
    "second":"{\"p1\":\"p1 value\"}"
}

Yeh the application doesn’t even break into the service itself unless the method has either a Stream, or no arguments. There is only 1 post method in this service, the other is a GET method which is working correctly.

I’ve used http://www.codeproject.com/KB/ajax/jQueryWCFRest.aspx as a reference implementation, but have been unable to get it to work on this solution.

Is there something that I’m missing here that hopefully someone else can see?

Leon

Answer 1

Bleh… the problem turned out to be the way the request was serializing values!

{
    "first":"{\"p1\":\"p1 value\",\"p2\":\"p2 value\",\"p3\":100\"p4\":null}",
    "second":"{\"p1\":\"p1 value\"}"
}

Should have been without the escaped quotes….

{
    "first":"{"p1":"p1 value","p2":"p2 value","p3":100"p4":null}",
    "second":"{"p1":"p1 value"}"
}

The reason this was happening was JSON.stringify was being called not only on the wrapped request parameters, but on each parameter as well.