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

C# – How to get the status code when using HttpClient

When you use HttpClient to make requests, you can directly get the status code from the HttpResponseMessage object, like this: The main reason for checking the status code is to determine if the request was successful and then reacting to error status codes (usually by throwing an exception). The HttpResponseMessage class has two helpers that … 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

Postman – Follow redirects with the original HTTP method

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

C# – Handling redirects with HttpClient

HttpClient handles redirects automatically. When you send a request, if the response contains a redirect status code (3xx) and redirect location, then it’ll send a new request to the redirect location. You can turn off this auto-redirect behavior by passing in an HttpClientHandler with AllowAutoRedirect=false. This prevents it from following redirects automatically, and allows you … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to return a 500 response

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

ASP.NET Core – How to unit test an ApiController

The key to unit testing an ApiController class is to mock out all of its dependencies, including the controller’s HttpContext property, like this: If the controller method you’re testing uses anything from the HttpContext, then you’ll want to swap in your own value. Otherwise HttpContext will be null and you’ll get a NullReferenceException. Fortunately Microsoft … Read more

How to use toxiproxy to simulate web API error scenarios

When you have code that calls an endpoint, you need to make sure it’s resilient and can handle error scenarios, such as timeouts. One way to prove your code is resilient is by using toxiproxy to simulate bad behavior. Toxiproxy sits between your client code and the endpoint. It receives requests from your client, applies … Read more

Error: Synchronous operations are disallowed

Problem When you try to do a synchronous IO operation in ASP.NET Core (such as writing to a file), you get the following exception: System.InvalidOperationException: ‘Synchronous operations are disallowed. Call WriteAsync or set AllowSynchronousIO to true The reason you’re getting this is because server option AllowSynchronousIO is false. Starting in ASP.NET Core 3.0, this is … Read more

C# – How to make concurrent requests with HttpClient

The HttpClient class was designed to be used concurrently. It’s thread-safe and can handle multiple requests. You can fire off multiple requests from the same thread and await all of the responses, or fire off requests from multiple threads. No matter what the scenario, HttpClient was built to handle concurrent requests. To use HttpClient effectively … Read more