Question

I’m picking up a prototype that my coworker built. I’m a total noob with C# and web services unfortunately. One method in the service is like:

    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "GetTestData/{file}")]
    public Stream GetTestData(string file)
    {
        string fileName =
           "\\filePath" + file;
        if (File.Exists(fileName))
        {
            FileStream stream = File.OpenRead(fileName);
            if (WebOperationContext.Current != null)
            {
                WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = "text/.txt";
            }
            return stream;
        }
        return null;
    }

When I type in the URL from my device like

http://filepath/myFile1.txt

then I get myFile1.txt. She said it was a rest service. Is there an easy way to add headers to this so I can just send the device all the data at once?

Like on the device I can ask for

http://filePath/myFiles

and get myFile1-myFile5.txt? Right now, the crude implementation is I have to ask for each file individually. It would seem better to have the server responsible for sending the packets right? Or is that breaking her rest service? Thanks!

Answer 1

Is there an easy way to add headers to this so I can just send the
device all the data at once?

I’m not too sure what you mean here, I think a little bit more context would help. If the client (device) is capable of accepting a response containing multiple files and this is a common use case then sure, the rest resource can return multiple files. For example, you can implement an additional resource for: http://filePath/myFiles like so:

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "myFiles")]
public Stream GetAllTestData()
{
   // get all files, merge into stream and return.
}

Also, in the sample you provided, to be more RESTful, the Content-Type should be “text/plain” not “text/.txt” and instead of returning null when file isn’t found an WebException with 404 status code should be raised.