Question

WCF gurus,

you probably already know the answer I cannot find …

let’s say I have some web service (WCF) and a client application (based on curl library). Sometimes on the server site I got the strange error:

The OperationFormatter could not deserialize any information from the Message because the Message is empty (IsEmpty = true).
System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException: The OperationFormatter could not deserialize any information from the Message because the Message is empty (IsEmpty = true).
Source: System.ServiceModel
Stack trace:
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.PrimitiveOperationFormatter.DeserializeRequest(Message message, Object[] parameters)
Rethrown as:
System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: Error in deserializing body of request message for operation ‘…’. The OperationFormatter could not deserialize any information from the Message because the Message is empty (IsEmpty = true).
Source: System.ServiceModel
Stack trace:
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.PrimitiveOperationFormatter.DeserializeRequest(Message message, Object[] parameters)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DemultiplexingDispatchMessageFormatter.DeserializeRequest(Message message, Object[] parameters)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.UriTemplateDispatchFormatter.DeserializeRequest(Message message, Object[] parameters)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.CompositeDispatchFormatter.DeserializeRequest(Message message, Object[] parameters)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.DeserializeInputs(MessageRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc)
…

On the client site I see (in the log) that a client sends a request and the request is not empty (has some body) but I would like to verify that WCF receives this request from the wire.
How can I do that?
Ideally I would log an incoming request (raw bytes) in the error handler like System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.IErrorHandler, otherwise collect the data somewhere and then log them while the error happens (some kind of low-level http traffic proxy on the server side?).

Another solution could be install Wireshark on the server site but I prefer avoid it because it happens on customer site and I do not have any access to her machine.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think, I found good a little bit complicated solution. If you need to do something like what I have asked in the question, you need to implement MessageEncoder and install it via MessageEncodingBindingElement. Override ReadMessage(...) methods in MessageEncoder, there you will have access to the buffer that contains raw incoming body.