ASP.NET Core – Client-side custom validation attributes

I wrote about how to add custom validation attributes. These are used for model validation on the server-side. You can also use these for client-side validation, which I’ll show in this article. 1 – Implement IClientModelValidator The first step is to implement the IClientModelValidator interface in the custom validation attribute class. This has a single … Read more

C# – JSON value could not be converted to System.String

When you send a request to ASP.NET with a JSON body, you get the following exception: System.Text.Json.JsonException: The JSON value could not be converted to System.String. Path: $ | LineNumber: 0 | BytePositionInLine: 1. You can’t deserialize JSON to a string. You’re either using a string parameter with [FromBody] or your model has a string … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Control the graceful shutdown time for background services

ASP.NET Core gives you a chance to gracefully shutdown your background services (such as cleaning up and/or finishing in-progress work). By default, you’re given a grand total of 5 seconds to shutdown all background services. If you need more time than this, there are a few ways to control the graceful shutdown time, which I’ll … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to manually validate a model in a controller

Manually validating a model can mean a few different things. It depends on what you’re trying to do exactly. Are you trying to validate a model object against its validation attributes? Use TryValidateModel(). Are you trying to do validation logic manually (instead of using validation attributes)? You can add errors to ModelState in that case. … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to unit test a custom InputFormatter

In this article, I’ll show how to unit test a custom InputFormatter. The main thing to test is the output of the ReadRequestBodyAsync() method. To test this, you have to pass in an InputFormatterContext object containing the request body. As an example, I’ll show how to unit test the following ReadRequestBodyAync() method: Note: This parses … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to receive requests with XML content

Receiving requests with XML content is straightforward. You have to register the built-in XML InputFormatter (otherwise you get 415 – Unsupported Media Type errors). When a request comes in with an XML Content-Type (such as application/xml), it uses this InputFormatter to deserialize the request body XML. In this article, I’ll show step-by-step how to receive … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to receive a request with text/plain content

When a request comes in and your action method has parameters, the framework tries to find the appropriate InputFormatter to handle deserializing the request data. There’s no built-in text/plain InputFormatter though, so when you send a request with text/plain content, it fails with a 415 – Unsupported Media Type error response. In this article, I’ll … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Only one parameter per action may be bound from body

When you have multiple parameters on an action method that are bound to the request body (implicitly or explicitly), you get the following fatal exception upon starting the web API: System.InvalidOperationException: Action ‘RecipeController.Post’ has more than one parameter that was specified or inferred as bound from request body. Only one parameter per action may be … Read more

C# – How to disable ModelStateInvalidFilter

There are two options for disabling ModelStateInvalidFilter: You’d do this when you want to manually perform model validation. I’ll show both options below. Disable ModelStateInvalidFilter globally To disable ModelStateInvalidFilter for *all* actions, set SuppressModelStateInvalidFilter=true in ConfigureApiBehaviorOptions, like this: Disable ModelStateInvalidFilter for specific actions To disable ModelStateInvalidFilter selectively, you can implement an IActionModelConvention attribute that removes … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Logging requests and responses

The simplest way to log requests/responses is to use the HTTP Logging middleware (added in v6). This is configurable, so you can make it suit your needs. If you need more control, you can add your own middleware instead. To use the HTTP Logging middleware, call UseHttpLogging() in your initialization code: Then add Microsoft.AspNetCore.HttpLogging.HttpLoggingMiddleware to … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Create a custom model validation attribute

There are many built-in model validation attributes available – such as [Required] and [Range] – which you can use to handle most validation scenarios. When these aren’t sufficient, you can create a custom validation attribute with your own validation logic. I’ll show an example of how to do that. 1 – Subclass ValidationAttribute and implement … Read more

Redirect a request in ASP.NET Core

Redirecting a request means returning a response with redirect status code (3xx) and a redirect URL in the Location header. The client uses this info to follow the redirect (which means making a request to the redirect URL). You can redirect by using a helper method (from ControllerBase) or returning a RedirectResult. I’ll show several … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Getting query string values

The ASP.NET Core framework automatically parses query strings (i.e. ?name=Dune&year=2021) into HttpContext.Request.Query and maps the query string values to parameters in the action method (if you’ve added them). You can get the mapped query string values by adding action parameters, like this: Or you can use HttpContext.Request.Query directly (which is useful in many scenarios): This … Read more