Consuming a stream in the context of a Servicestack client - .net-4.0

While I have already learned how I can easily write to the response stream, I was wondering whether in the context of a ServiceStack client (e.g. ServiceClientBase) I can gain access to the server's response stream.
Before I start accessing the HttpWebResponse object I wanted to double-check that I do not reinvent the wheel.

See this earlier answer for examples of how to access the underlying raw response types.
Also the C# ServiceClient wiki is the authoritative documentation on ServiceStack's built in C#/.NET service clients. It includes a section on different ways of accessing the underlying raw response, including via the Response stream:
using (Stream responseStream = client.Get<Stream>("/poco/World")) {
var dto = responseStream.ReadFully().FromUtf8Bytes().FromJson<PocoResponse>();
dto.Result //Hello, World
}

Related

How to access to request body using WebFlux and Netty HttpClient

I need to calculate some kind of digest of the request body using the WebClient of Webflux and this digest must be set into a HTTP header. Using the good old Spring MVC ClientHttpRequestInterceptor is easy because the request body is provided as an array of bytes.
The ExchangeFilterFunction does not provide access to the request body.
The body is sent as JSon and Spring uses Jackson in order to serialize Java objects, so an option could be serialize my Object into Json and calculate the digest on it, but this strategy has two drawbacks:
my code would repeat what Spring will do when the request is actually sent
there's no guarantee that the acutal bytes sent by Spring as a request are equal to what I've passed to the digest function
I suppose that I should use some low level API of Netty, but I can't find any example.
I implemented the solution proposed by #rewolf and it worked, but I encountered an issue because of the multi-threading nature of WebFlux.
In fact, it's possible that the client request is saved into the thread-local map by one thread, but a different thread tries to get it, so a null value is returned.
For example, it happens if the request to be signed is created inside a Rest controller method which has a Mono as a request body parameter:
#PostMapping
public String execute(#RequestBody Mono<MyBody> body){
Mono<OtherBody> otherBody = body.map(this::transformBodyIntoOtherBody);
...
webClient.post()
.body(otherBody)
.exchange();
...
}
According to Reactor specs, the Reactor Context should be used instead of Thread Local.
I forked #rewolf project and implemented a solution based on Reactor Context: https://github.com/taxone/blog-hmac-auth-webclient
This is not currently easy to do with WebClient. But there are ways to do so by intercepting the body post-serialization. This can be done by registering a custom encoder that intercepts the data after encoding, and the passes it to a custom HttpConnector to inject it as a header.
This blog post explains one way to achieve it: https://andrew-flower.com/blog/Custom-HMAC-Auth-with-Spring-WebClient
Edit: Currently this blog post doesn't take into account concurrent requests. See the accepted answer by Claodio for the modified approach.

WCF and Data Transfer Object

I am stuck on this simple question. In my console application, I want to consume a wcf service. So I add the web reference to the project and call it. That is it.
But why I saw some examples especially using RESTSHARP, they never add web reference. They just use so called "DTO" to return object by the service and consume it.
I hope somebody can clarify the concepts for me. Is DTO used inside WCF?
sample:
private static List<ApplicationDTO> features;
RestClient client = new RestClient("http://" + baseUrl + "/FacilityData.svc");
var request = new RestRequest(Method.GET);
request.Resource = "/GetFeatures";
request.Parameters.Clear();
request.AddParameter("Id", 888);
var response = client.Execute(request);
features = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<ApplicationDTO>>(response.Content);
from this post:
For REST service, it provides a generic way for WCF service consuming
which doesn't rely on the SOAP. That's why we no longer need "Add
ServiceReference..." for consuming it. REST service operations can be
accessed through standard HTTP GET/POST request, so any webrequest
enabled client can consume it. For example, you can use HttpWebRequest
to invoke a REST operation and use LINQ to XML to load and extract
values from the response XML data. It's very flexible.
DTO, usually used for Data Transfer Object - is nothing more then entity you want to pass as parameter / receive as a result.
In your example, ApplicationDTO - is probably some entity to hold Data about Application Feature object (Name, Type, ...)

Programmatically Invoke WCF REST Service Without Reference to Contract

This is useful as a basis:
How to programmatically connect a client to a WCF service?
However, I'd like my client to do the same thing REST-style without knowledge of any service contract.
Seeing how this is done easily in Javascript / jQuery, it seems odd that C# presents no options.
In C# all you need is a standard HttpWebRequest or WebClient like this:
var request = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://localhost:28330/books");
var response = request.GetResponse();
var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
or
var client = new WebClient();
Console.WriteLine(client.DownloadString("http://localhost:28330/books"));
Of course you still need to do something with the XML or JSON (or whatever data format is returned) but that is no different in JavaScript with jQuery.
Seeing how this is done easily in Javascript / jQuery, it seems odd
that C# presents no options.
That is only partially true. It does - you can use HttpWebRequest to do a call. Old REST StarterKit (only technology preview) and a new Web-API (only CTP) offers better support in HttpClient class.

Best practices for streaming response of WCF webservice

I'm trying to pull a large amount of data out of a WCF web service. The request is fairly small and the response message will be very big. Currently the web service is throwing SystemOutOfMemory exceptions due a limitation on IIS6 for the memory it can allocated (~1.4GB).
I have read in some blogs that implementing streaming will solve my problem.
Can anybody share their experiences with this topic? I'm most interested in any sample client-side & service-side code that can be shared or any recommendations/best practices. MemoryStream vs FileStream? Return type should be Stream, Message, Byte[]?
My operation looks like the following: (typically it will return a big number of elements in the response array, ~200K elements)
MediumSizeResponseClass[] GetData(SmallSizeRequestClass request)
If you want to stream back only the response, then use transferMode=streamedResponse in your binding configuration. This makes sure only the returned response will be streamed.
The return value of a streaming function must be a Stream. You can then read from that stream and do whatever you need to do with it (store it, analyse it, whatever).
So basically you'd have a service contract something like this:
[ServiceContract]
interface IYourService
{
[OperationContract]
Stream GetData(SmallSizeRequestClass request);
}
On the server, you basically just write to a stream, while on the client, you read from the stream.
Have you consulted the MSDN docs on WCF Streaming?

Best way to support "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" post data with WCF?

I'm building a WCF service based on a W3C specification which defines a RESTful web service endpoint that accepts "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" post data. WCF doesn't support this type of message encoding by default and I have found a number of different examples of creating a contract that looks like this:
XElement Query_Post(Stream postData);
And then within the implementation decoding the postData stream using the HttpUtility.ParseQueryString method.
Does anyone know of a more strongly typed way of supporting "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" in WCF?
I would like my operation contract to be:
XElement Query_Post(string query, string [] params);
The best way is to use Stream like Raw HTTP POST with WCF or what you are saying.
The reason is because WCF abstracts all the communication-level physical layout stuff out from the service code. Ideally, you would want to make a service that could turn into SOAP or REST just by flipping the switch.
To support it natively, you probably have to extend WebHttpBinding or make your own binding and implement custom encoder. This is symmetric to the output like the linked post says. You have to twist its arms to get WCF to output non-XML/JSON stuff.
The WCF REST Contrib library enables this functionality:
https://github.com/mikeobrien/WcfRestContrib
It includes a POX formatter and form url encoded formatter and allows you to easily create your own. Formatters are mapped to mime types and automatically selected to serialize/deserialize the entity body based on the content type and accept headers.