Question

I have the following problem.
I have the method that sends json via POST:

public string request (string handler, string data) 
{
    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(baseUri + "/?h=" + handler);
    request.Method = "POST";
    request.ContentType = "text/json";

    string json = "json=" + data;
    byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(json);
    request.ContentLength = bytes.Length;

    Stream str = request.GetRequestStream();
    str.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
    str.Close();

    WebResponse res = request.GetResponse();
    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream());
    lastResponse = sr.ReadToEnd();
    return lastResponse;
}

When using the method on the server does not come data in POST. As if this code is not executed.

Stream str = request.GetRequestStream();
str.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
str.Close();

On the server i’m using following php script for debug:

<?php print_r($_POST); ?>

Also tried to write to the stream as follows:

StreamWriter strw = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream());
strw.Write(json);
strw.Close();

The result – a zero response. In response comes an empty array.

Answer 1

The Problem is, that PHP does not “recognize” the text/json-content type. And thus does not parse the POST-request-data. You have to use the application/x-www-form-urlencoded content-type and secondly you have to encode the POST-data properly:

// ...
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

string json = "json=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(data);
// ...

If you intend to supply the JSON-data directly you can leave the content-type to text/json and pass the data directly as json (without the “json=” part):

string json = data;

But in that case you have to change your script on the PHP-side to directly read the post data:

// on your PHP side:
$post_body = file_get_contents('php://input');
$json = json_decode($post_body);