Passing a string param to a RESTful service during POST action - wcf

Question

I am having a RESTful service with the following method:
[WebInvoke]
string GetDataFromStringAsString(string xmlString);
My client call to the method is as below:
var client = new RestClient();
client.BaseUrl = serviceBaseUrl;
var request = new RestRequest(method){RequestFormat = DataFormat.Xml};
request.Resource = resourceUrl;
request.AddParameter("text/xml", requestBody,
ParameterType.RequestBody);
var response = client.Execute(request);
Let us take a string to post as "Hello World".
Now the string that i post to the above method gives me a 400 Bad
request. In order to get it working i had to wrap the above string in
a element as shown below:
<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/
Serialization/">Hello World</string>
Now when i post the above string i get a success response back from
the server.
Why is that i have to manually wrap the string to make it work. Is
there a way that i can achieve to post a string without doing the
above manually.

Answer 1

The only other way that I am aware of is to use stream as your input parameter. e.g.
[WebInvoke]
string GetDataFromStringAsString(stream xmlString);
The problem with .Net 4 WCF REST is that fundamentally WCF only knows how to pass two types of info, either XML or a stream of bytes. Personally, I would use WCF Web API instead of the standard WCF REST library because you are going run into lots more of these kinds of issues.