GET and POST to ASP.NET MVC via C#

Question

I have a Windows app written in C#. This app will be deployed to my user's desktops. It will interact with a back-end that has already been created. The back-end is written in ASP.NET MVC 3. It exposes a number of GET and POST operations as shown here:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)] 
public ActionResult GetItem(string id, string caller) 
{ 
  // Do stuff 
}

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult SaveItem(string p1, string p2, string p3)
{
  // Do stuff
}

The web developers on my team are successfully interacting with these operations via JQuery. So I know they work. But I need to figure out how to interact with them from my Windows C# app. I was using the WebClient, but ran into some performance problems so I was consulted to use the WebRequest object. In an honest effort to attempt this, I tried the following:

WebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.myapp.com/actions/AddItem"); 
request.Method = "POST"; 
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";  
request.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(AddItem_Completed), request);

My problem is, I'm not sure how to actually send the data (the parameter values) back to my endpoints. How do I send the parameter values back to my GET and POST operations? Can someone give me some help? Thank you!

testuser · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-23 17:10:19Z

4

One way is to write the input to request stream. You need to serialize input to byte array Please see below sample code

        string requestXml = "someinputxml";
        byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(requestXml);

        var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
        request.Method = "POST";
        request.ContentLength = bytes.Length;
        request.ContentType = "application/xml";

        using (var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
        {
            requestStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
        }

        using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
        {
            statusCode = response.StatusCode;

            if (statusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
            {                   
                responseString = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
            }
        }

answered Apr 23, 2012 at 17:10

testuser

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2 Comments

JavaScript Developer Over a year ago

Maybe I'm confused. But I know that my web devs are submitting json back to my actions via jquery. how do I do submit that same type of info via the WebRequest?

villecoder Over a year ago

You need to serialize your data into a JSON string. Look into using JSON.net for that. You would then convert that string to a byte array, similar to what testuser is doing to his variable "requestXml".

kprobst · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-23 17:03:55Z

1

Well, with WebClient the simplest example would be something like this:

NameValueCollection postData = new NameValueCollection();
postData["field-name-one"] = "value-one";
postData["field-name-two"] = "value-two";

WebClient client = new WebClient();
byte[] responsedata = webClient.UploadValues("http://example.com/postform", "POST", postData);

Have you tried this?

answered Apr 23, 2012 at 17:03

kprobst

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1 Comment

JavaScript Developer Over a year ago

I can't use the WebClient. Its a long story. But I really need to use the WebRequest.

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