Question

I’m working with a REST web service that uses basic authentication and returns me an XML string. Here is the method that I use to get the data and return it as an XDocument:

        var req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
        String readToEnd;
        const string postData = "";
        var encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
        byte[] byte1 = encoding.GetBytes(postData);

        req.Method = "POST";
        req.Timeout = 10000;
        req.ContentType = "text/XML";
        req.ContentLength = byte1.Length;

        string authInfo = userName + ":" + password;

        authInfo = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(authInfo));
        req.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + authInfo;

        var newStream = req.GetRequestStream();
        newStream.Write(byte1, 0, byte1.Length);
        newStream.Close();

        try
        {
            var resp = req.GetResponse();
            var answer = resp.GetResponseStream();
            var _answer = new StreamReader(answer);
            readToEnd = _answer.ReadToEnd();
            answer.Close();
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            readToEnd = null;
        }

        return readToEnd != null ? XDocument.Parse(readToEnd) : null;

Now later on, I’ve manipulated that xml and I’m ready to post it back to another uri. I would think it would be the same code except maybe putting my new XML string inside the variable ‘postData’?

Is this the correct way to post an xml string to a webservice? I’ve looked but cant seem to shed any light on this when basic authorization is being used.

Answer 1

I do the following. The key is that you have to write your data to the request stream before posting. Hope it helps.

 var request = CreateBaseRequest(body);
        HttpWebResponse WebResp = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
        Stream Answer = WebResp.GetResponseStream();
        StreamReader response = new StreamReader(Answer);
        var r = response.ReadToEnd();

 static HttpWebRequest CreateBaseRequest(string postData)
    {

        var req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(@"https://xyz.com/");

        req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8";
        req.Method = "POST";
        req.KeepAlive = true;

        byte[] buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(postData);

        req.ContentLength = buffer.Length;
        Stream PostData = req.GetRequestStream();
        PostData.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
        PostData.Close();

        return req;

    }