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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
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
There are two ways to receive CSV data in a web API: In this article, I’ll show examples of both of these approaches. I’ll be using the CsvHelper library to parse CSV data into model objects and then do model validation. Note: To use CsvHelper, install the CsvHelper package (Install-Package CsvHelper). Or use whichever parser … Read more
Input formatters are used to deserialize the request body to a model object (which is then passed into an action method). There are built-in input formatters for handling JSON and XML. You can add your own input formatter when you want to customize request body deserialization. There are two scenarios where a custom InputFormatter would … Read more
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
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
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
In .NET 5 and above, you can use the HttpClient Sync API methods – Send() and ReadAsStream() – to send HTTP requests synchronously (as opposed to resorting to sync-over-async). Here’s the steps for doing this: HttpClient was originally designed for async requests and has many async convenience methods (like GetAsync() and ReadAsStringAsync()). There aren’t sync … Read more
Postman is a great tool for web development. You can send a request to any web API, look at the response details, and reuse the the request later (which saves lots of effort!). This is useful for testing your own web API, or for when you’re integrating with a third-party API and want to try … Read more
When you send a request with Postman and get a 301/302 redirect response, it follows the redirect with a forced GET. This means it sends a GET request to the redirect URL and doesn’t include the original HTTP method or Content-Type. This can result in two unexpected errors: Here’s what this looks like in Postman … Read more
When you’re developing a web API with file uploading, you can use Postman to send files in test requests. This simplifies development because you don’t have to write your own client-side code for sending the test requests. In this article, I’ll show how to upload a file with Postman by posting a file in a … Read more
When the client posts a file in a multipart/form-data request, it’s loaded into an IFormFile object. This contains file information (such as the file name) and exposes the file content as a stream. This allows you to save the file content or process it however you want to. You can access the IFormFile object through … Read more
The simplest way to return a 500 response is to use the Problem() helper method, like this: This method returns an ObjectResult with status code 500 and a generic error message, which gets serialized to JSON and returned in the response body. The response looks like this: The ControllerBase class has many helper methods like … Read more
To get posted form data in an API Controller (using the [ApiController] attribute) in ASP.NET Core, use parameters with the [FromForm] attribute. Now send a request with form data to this endpoint to see it work. The request would look like this: The form data is a string of key-value pairs (ex: location=United+States). The framework … Read more