How can I use a default value/model on WebAPI EmptyBody? - asp.net

Question

I have dotnet WebAPI and I'm trying to get a specific behaviour but am constantly getting 415 responses.
I have reproduced this by starting a new webapi project using dotnet new webapi on the command line. From there, I added two things: a new controller, and a model class. In my real project the model class is obviously a bit more complex, with inheritance and methods etc...
Here they are:
[HttpGet("/data")]
public async Task<IActionResult> GetModel(BodyParams input)
{
var response = new { Message = "Hello", value = input.valueOne };
return Ok(response);
}
public class BodyParams {
public bool valueOne { get; set; } = true;
}
My goal is that the user can call https://localhost:7222/data with no headers or body needed at all, and will get the response - BodyParams will be used with the default value of true. Currently, from postman, or from the browser, I get a 415 response.
I've worked through several suggestions on stack and git but nothing seems to be working for me. Specifically, I have tried:
Adding [FromBody(EmptyBodyBehavior = EmptyBodyBehavior.Allow)] into the controller, but this makes no difference unless I provide an empty {} json object in the body. This is not what I want.
Making BodyParams nullable - again, no change.
Adding .AddControllers(opt => opt.AllowEmptyInputInBodyModelBinding = true)... again, no change.
I Implemented the solution suggested here using the attribute modification in the comment by #HappyGoLucky. Again, this did not give the desired outcome, but it did change the response to : 400 - "The input does not contain any JSON tokens. Expected the input to start with a valid JSON token, when isFinalBlock is true."
I tried modifying the solution in (4) to manually set context.HttpContext.Request.Body to an empty json object... but I can't figure out the syntax for this because it need to be a byte array and at that point I feel like I am way over complicating this.
How can I get the controller to use BodyParams with default values in the case that the user provides no body and no headers at all?

Answer 1

You can achieve that using a Minimal API.
app.MapGet("/data",
async (HttpRequest httpRequest) =>
{
var value = true;
if (Equals(httpRequest.GetTypedHeaders().ContentType, MediaTypeHeaderValue.Parse("application/json")))
{
var bodyParams = await httpRequest.ReadFromJsonAsync<BodyParams>();
if (bodyParams is not null) value = bodyParams.ValueOne;
}
var response = new {Message = "Hello", value};
return Results.Ok(response);
});

Answer 2

So, as there doesn't seem to be a more straightforward answer, I have currently gone with the approach number 5) from the OP, and just tweaking the code from there very slightly.
All this does is act as an action which checks the if the user has passed in any body json. If not, then it adds in an empty anonymous type. The behaviour then is to use the default True value from the BodyParams class.
The full code for the action class is:
internal class AllowMissingContentTypeForEmptyBodyConvention : Attribute, IActionModelConvention
{
public void Apply(ActionModel action)
{
action.Filters.Add(new AllowMissingContentTypeForEmptyBodyFilter());
}
private class AllowMissingContentTypeForEmptyBodyFilter : IResourceFilter
{
public void OnResourceExecuting(ResourceExecutingContext context)
{
if (!context.HttpContext.Request.HasJsonContentType()
&& (context.HttpContext.Request.ContentLength == default
|| context.HttpContext.Request.ContentLength == 0))
{
context.HttpContext.Request.ContentType = "application/json";
var str = new { };
//convert string to jsontype
var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(str);
//modified stream
var requestData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json);
context.HttpContext.Request.Body = new MemoryStream(requestData);
}
}
public void OnResourceExecuted(ResourceExecutedContext context)
{
// Do nothing
}
}
}
Then you can add this to any of your controllers using [AllowMissingContentTypeForEmptyBodyConvention]