Question

When I access the Request object as a collection, where does it get it’s data from?

For example I know

Request["someKey"]

will return the value of either

Request.QueryString["someKey"]

or

Request.Form["someKey"]

depending on which is set.

Are any other collections searched (cookies, session)?

What happens is the key value pair exists in several of the collections?

I took a look in MSDN, but couldn’t find much info.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httpcontext.request

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

If you decompile this assembly and take a look at the source, it will look in QueryString, then Form, then Cookies, then ServerVariables, before finally returning null if none of them contain the item.

public string this[string key]
{
    get
    {
        string item = this.QueryString[key];
        if (item == null)
        {
            item = this.Form[key];
            if (item == null)
            {
                HttpCookie httpCookie = this.Cookies[key];
                if (httpCookie == null)
                {
                    item = this.ServerVariables[key];
                    if (item == null)
                    {
                        return null;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        return item;
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    return httpCookie.Value;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                return item;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            return item;
        }
   }
}